“I thought you were asleep,” she said.

“I got restless. What’s going on?”

“Just checking supplies. This is our advanced technology unit,” she said, lifting up a small backpack. “We’ve developed a miniaturized package for field parties; twenty pounds of equipment contains everything a man needs for two weeks:

food, water, clothing, everything.”

“Even water?” Elliot asked.

Water was heavy: seven-tenths of human body weight was water, and most of the weight of food was water; that was why dehydrated food was so light. But water was far more critical to human life than food. Men could survive for weeks without food, but they would die in a matter of hours without water. And water was heavy.

Ross smiled. “The average man consumes four to six liters a day, which is eight to thirteen pounds of weight. On a two-week expedition to a desert region, we’d have to provide two hundred pounds of water for each man. But we have a NASA water-recycling unit which purifies all excretions, including urine. It weighs six ounces. That’s how we do it.”

Seeing his expression, she said, “It’s not bad at all. Our purified water is cleaner than what you get from the tap.,’

“I’ll take your word for it.” Elliot picked up a pair of strange-looking sunglasses. They were very dark and thick, and there was a peculiar lens mounted over the forehead bridge.

“Holographic night goggles,” Ross said. “Employing thin-film diffraction optics.” She then pointed out a vibration-free camera lens with optical systems that compensated for movement, strobe infrared lights, and miniature survey lasers no larger than a pencil eraser. There was also a series of small tripods with rapid-geared motors mounted on the top, and brackets to hold something, but she did not explain these devices beyond saying they were “defensive units.”

Elliot drifted toward the far table, where he found six submachine guns set out under the lights. He picked one up; it was heavy, and gleaming with grease. Clips of ammunition lay stacked nearby. Elliot did not notice the lettering on the stock; the machine guns were Russian AK-47s manufactured under license in Czechoslovakia.

He glanced at Ross.

“Just precautions,” Ross said. “We carry them on every expedition. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Elliot shook his head. “Tell me about your GPU from Houston,” he said.

“I’m not worried about it,” she said.

“I am,” Elliot said.

As Ross explained it, the GPU was just a technical report. The Zaire government had closed its eastern borders during the previous twenty-four hours; no tourist or commercial traffic could enter the country from Rwanda or Uganda; everyone now had to enter the country from the west, through Kinshasa.

No official reason was given for closing the eastern border, although sources in Washington speculated that Idi Amin’s troops, fleeing across the Zaire border from the Tanzanian invasion of Uganda, might be causing “local difficulties.” In central Africa, local difficulties usually meant cannibalism and other atrocities.

“Do you believe that?” Elliot asked. “Cannibalism and atrocities?”

“No,” Ross said. “It’s all a lie. It’s the Dutch and the Germans and the Japanese—probably your friend Morikawa. The Euro-Japanese electronics consortium knows that ERTS is close to discovering important diamond reserves in Virunga. They want to slow us down as much as they can. They’ve got the fix in somewhere, probably in Kinshasa, and closed the eastern borders. It’s nothing more than that.”

“If there’s no danger, why the machine guns?”

“Just precautions,” she said again. “We’ll never use machine guns on this trip, believe me. Now why don’t you get some sleep? We’ll be landing in Tangier soon.”

“Tangier?”

“Captain Munro is there.”

6. Munro

THE NAME OF “CAPTAIN” CHARLES MUNRO WAS not to be found on the list of the expedition leaders employed by any of the usual field parties. There were several reasons for this, foremost among them his distinctly unsavory reputation.

Munro had been raised in the wild Northern Frontier Province of Kenya, the illegitimate son of a Scottish farmer and his handsome Indian housekeeper. Munro’s father had the bad luck to be killed by Mau Mau guerillas in 1956. * Soon afterward, Munro’s mother died of tuberculosis, and Munro made his way to Nairobi where in the late 1950s he worked as a white hunter, leading parties of tourists into the bush. It was during this time that Munro awarded himself the title of “Captain,” although he had never served in the military.

Apparently, Captain Munro found humoring tourists uncongenial; by 1960, he was reported running guns from Uganda into the newly independent Congo. After Moise Tshombe went into exile in 1963, Munro’s activities became politically embarrassing, and ultimately forced him to disappear from East Africa in late 1963.

He appeared again in 1964, as one of General Mobutu’s white mercenaries in the Congo, under the leadership of Colonel “Mad Mike” Hoare. Hoare assessed Munro as a “hard, lethal customer who knew the jungle and was highly effective, when we could get him away from the ladies.”

*Although more than nineteen thousand people were killed in the Mau Mau uprisings. only thirty-seven whites were killed during seven years of terrorism. Each dead white was properly regarded more as a victim of circumstance than of emerging black politics.

Following the capture of Stanleyville in Operation Dragon Rouge, Munro’s name was associated with the mercenary atrocities at a village called Avakabi. Munro again disappeared for several years.

In 1968, he re-emerged in Tangier, where he lived splendidly and was something of a local character. The source of Munro’.s obviously substantial income was unclear, but he was said to have supplied Communist Sudanese rebels with East German light arms in 1971, to have assisted the royalist Ethiopians in their rebellion in 1974—1975, and to have assisted the French paratroopers who dropped into Zaire’s Shaba province in 1978.

His mixed activities made Munro a special case in Africa in the 1970s; although he was persona non grata in a half-dozen African states, he traveled freely throughout the continent, using various passports. It was a transparent ruse: every border official recognized him on sight, but these officials were equally afraid to let him enter the country or to deny him entry.

Foreign mining and exploration companies, sensitive to local feeling, were reluctant to hire Munro as an expedition leader for their parties. It was also true that Munro was by far the most expensive of the bush guides. Nevertheless, he had a reputation for getting tough, difficult jobs done. Under an assumed name, he had taken two German tin-mining parties into the Cameroons in 1974; and he had led one previous ERTS expedition into Angola during the height of the armed conflict in 1977. He quit another ERTS field group headed for Zambia the following year after Houston refused to meet his price: Houston had canceled the expedition.

In short, Munro was acknowledged as the best man for dangerous travel. That was why the ERTS jet stopped in Tangier.

At the Tangier airport, the ERTS cargo jet and its contents were bonded, but all ongoing personnel except Amy passed through customs, carrying their personal belongings. Jensen and Irving were pulled aside for searches; trace quantities of heroin were discovered in their hand baggage.

This bizarre event occurred through a series of remarkable coincidences, In 1977, United States customs agents began to employ neutron backscatter devices, as well as chemical vapor detectors, or sniffers. Both were hand-held electronic devices manufactured under contract by Morikawa Electronics in Tokyo. In 1978, questions arose about the accuracy of these devices; Morikawa suggested that they be tested at other ports of entry around the world, including Singapore, Bangkok, Delhi, Munich, and Tangier.

Thus Morikawa Electronics knew the capabilities of the detectors at Tangier airport, and they also knew that a variety of substances, including ground poppy seeds and shredded turnip, would produce a false-positive registration on airport sensors. And the “false-positive net” required forty-eight hours to untangle. (It was later shown that both men had somehow acquired traces of turnip on their briefcases.)

Both Irving and Jensen vigorously denied any knowledge of illicit material, and appealed to the local U.S. consular office. But the case could not be resolved for several days; Ross telephoned Travis in Houston, who determined it was a “Dutch herring.” There was nothing to be done except to carry on, and continue with the expedition as best they could.

“They think this will stop us,” Travis said, “but it won’t.”

“Who’s going to do the geology?” Ross asked.

“You are,” Travis said.

“And the electronics?”

“You’re the certified genius,” Travis said. “Just make sure you have Munro. He’s the key to everything.”

The song of the muezzin floated over the pastel jumble of houses in the Tangier Casbah at twilight, calling the faithful to evening prayer. In the old days, the muezzin himself appeared in the minarets of the mosque, but now a recording played over loudspeakers: a mechanized call to the Muslim ritual of obeisance.

Karen Ross sat on the terrace of Captain Munro’s house overlooking the Casbah and waited for her audience with the man himself. Beside her, Peter Elliot sat in a chair and snored noisily, exhausted from the long flight.

They had been waiting nearly three hours, and she was worried. Munro’s house was of Moorish design, and open to the outdoors. From the interior she could hear voices, faintly carried by the breeze, speaking some Oriental language.

One of the graceful Moroccan servant girls that Munro seemed to have in infinite supply came onto the terrace carrying a telephone. She bowed formally. Ross saw that the girl had violet eyes; she was exquisitely beautiful, and could not have been more than sixteen. In careful English the girl said, “This is your telephone to Houston. The bidding will now begin.”

Karen nudged Peter, who awoke groggily. “The bidding will now begin,” she said.

Peter Elliot was surprised from the moment of his first entrance into Munro’s house. He had anticipated a tough military setting and was amazed to see delicate carved Moroccan arches and soft gurgling fountains with sunlight sparkling on them.

Then he saw the Japanese and, Germans in the next room, staring at him and at Ross. The glances were distinctly unfriendly, but Ross stood and said, “Excuse me a moment,” and she went forward and embraced a young blond German man warmly. They kissed, chattered happily, and in general appeared to be intimate friends.

Elliot did not like this development, but he was reassured to see that the Japanese—identically dressed in black suits— were equally displeased. Noticing this, Elliot smiled benignly, to convey a sense of approval for the reunion.

But when Ross returned, he demanded, “Who was that?”

“That’s Richter,” she said. “The most brilliant topologist in Western Europe; his field is n-space extrapolation. His work’s extremely elegant.” She smiled. “Almost as elegant as mine.”

“But he works for the consortium?”

“Naturally. He’s German.”

“And you’re talking with him?”

“I was delighted for the opportunity,” she said. “Karl has a fatal limitation. He can only deal with pre-existing data. He takes what he is given, and does cartwheels with it in n-space. But he cannot imagine anything new at all. I had a

professor at M.I.T. who was the same way. Tied to facts, a

hostage to reality.” She shook her head.

“Did he ask about Amy?”

“Of course.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“I told him she was sick and probably dying.”

“And he believed that?”

“We’ll see. There’s Munro”

Captain Munro appeared in the next room, wearing khakis, smoking a cigar. He was a tall, rugged-looking man with a mustache, and soft dark watchful eyes that missed nothing. He talked with the Japanese and Germans, who were evidently unhappy with what he was saying. Moments later, Munro entered their room, smiling broadly.

“So you’re going to the Congo, Dr. Ross.”

“We are, Captain Munro,” she said.

Munro smiled. “It seems as though everyone is going.” There followed a rapid exchange which Elliot found incomprehensible. Karen Ross said, “Fifty thousand U.S. in Swiss francs against point oh two of first-year adjusted extraction returns.”

Munro shook his head. “A hundred in Swiss francs and point oh six of first-year return on the primary deposits, crude-grade accounting, no discounting.

“A hundred in U.S. dollars against point oh one of the first-year return on all deposits, with full discounting from point of origin.”

“Point of origin? In the middle of the bloody Congo? I would want three years from point of origin: what if you’re shut down?”

“You want a piece, you gamble. Mobutu’s clever.”

“Mobutu’s barely in control, and I am still alive because I am no gambler,” Munro said. “A hundred against point oh four of first year on primary with front-load discount only. Or I’ll take point oh two of yours.”

“If you’re no gambler, I’ll give you a straight buy-out for two hundred.”

Munro shook his head. “You’ve paid more than that for your MER in Kinshasa.”

“Prices for everything are inflated in Kinshasa, including mineral exploration rights. And the current exploration limit, the computer CEL, is running well under a thousand.”

“If you say so.” He smiled, and headed buck into the other room, where the Japanese and Germans were waiting for his return.

Ross said quickly, “That’s not for them to know.”

“Oh, I’m sure they know it anyway,” Munro said, and walked into the other room.

“Bastard,” she whispered to his back. She talked in low tones on the telephone. “He’ll never accept that. . . . No, no, he won’t go for it. . . they want him bad. . .”

Elliot said, “You’re bidding very high for his services.”

“He’s the best,” Ross said, and continued whispering into the telephone. In the next mom, Munro was shaking his head sadly, turning down an offer. Elliot noticed that Richter was very red in the face.

Munro came back to Karen Ross. “What was your projected CEL?”

“Under a thousand.”

“So you say. Yet you know there’s an ore intercept.”

“I don’t know there’s an ore intercept.”

“Then you’re foolish to spend all this money to go to the Congo,” Munro said. “Aren’t you?”

Karen Ross made no reply. She stared at the ornate ceiling of the room.

“Virunga’s not exactly a garden spot these days,” Munro continued. “The Kigani are on the rampage, and they’re cannibals. Pygmies aren’t friendly anymore either. Likely to find an arrow in your back for your troubles. Volcanoes always threatening to blow. Tsetse flies. Bad water. Corrupt officials. Not a place to go without a very good reason, hmm? Perhaps you should put off your trip until things settle down.”

Those were precisely Peter Elliot’s sentiments, and he said

so.

“Wise man,” Munro said, with a broad smile that annoyed Karen Ross.

“Evidently,” Karen Ross said, “we will never come to terms.”

“That seems clear.” Munro nodded.

Elliot understood that negotiations were broken off. He got up to shake Munro’s hand and leave—but before he could do that, Munro walked into the next room and conferred with the Japanese and Germans.

“Things are looking up,” Ross said.

“Why?” Elliot said. “Because he thinks he’s beaten you down?”

“No. Because he thinks we know more than they do about the site location and are more likely to hit an ore body and pay off.”

In the next room, the Japanese and Germans abruptly stood, and walked to the front door. At the door, Munro shook hands with the Germans, and bowed elaborately to the Japanese.

“I guess you’re right,” Elliot said to Ross. “He’s sending them away.”

But Ross was frowning, her face grim. “They can’t do this,” she said. “They can’t just quit this way.”

Elliot was confused again. “I thought you wanted them to quit.”

“Damn,” Ross said. “We’ve been screwed.” She whispered into the telephone, talking to Houston.

Elliot didn’t understand it at all. And his confusion was not resolved when Munro locked the door behind the last of the departing men, then came back to Elliot and Ross to say that supper was served.

They ate Moroccan-style, sitting on the floor and eating with their fingers. The first course was a pigeon pie, and it was followed by some sort of stew.

“So you sent the Japanese off?” Ross said. “Told them no?”

“Oh, no,” Munro said. “That would be impolite. I told

them I would think about it. And I will.”

“Then why did they leave?”

Munro shrugged. “Not my doing, I assure you. I think they heard something on the telephone which changed their whole plan.”

Karen Ross glanced at her watch, making a note of the time. “Very good stew,” she said. She was doing her best to be agreeable.

“Glad you like it. It’s tajin. Camel meat.”

Karen Ross coughed. Peter Elliot noticed that his own appetite had diminished. Munro turned to him. “So you have the gorilla, Professor Elliot?”

“How did you know that?”

“The Japanese told me. The Japanese are fascinated by your gorilla. Can’t figure the point of it, drives them mad. A young man with a gorilla, arid a young woman who is searching for—”

“Industrial-grade diamonds,” Karen Ross said.

“Ah, industrial-grade diamonds.” He turned to Elliot. “I enjoy a frank conversation. Diamonds, fascinating.” His manner suggested that he had been told nothing of importance.

Ross said, “You’ve got to take us in, Munro.”

“World’s full of industrial-grade diamonds,” Munro said. “You can find them in Africa, India, Russia, Brazil, Canada, even in America—Arkansas, New York, Kentucky— everywhere you look. But you’re going to the Congo.”

The obvious question hung in the air.

“We are looking for Type Jib boron-coated blue diamonds,” Karen Ross said, “which have semi conducting properties important to microelectronics applications.”

Munro stroked his mustache. “Blue diamonds,” he said, nodding. “It makes sense.”

Ross said that of course it made sense.

“You can’t dope them?” Munro asked.

“No. It’s been tried. There was a commercial boron-doping process, but it was too unreliable. The Americans had one and so did the Japanese. Everyone gave it up as hopeless

“So you’ve got to find a natural source.”

“That’s right. I want to get there as soon as possible,” Ross said, staring at him, her voice flat.

“I’m sure you do,” Munro said. “Nothing but business for our Dr. Ross, eh?” He crossed the room and, leaning against one of the arches, looked out on the dark Tangier night. “I’m not surprised at all,” he said. “As a matter of—”

At the first blast of machine-gun fire, Munro dived for cover, the glassware on the table splattered, one of the girls screamed, and Elliot and Ross threw themselves to the marble floor as the bullets whined around them, chipping the plaster overhead, raining plaster dust down upon them. The blast lasted thirty seconds or so, and it was followed by complete silence.

When it was over, they got up hesitantly, staring at one another.

“The consortium plays for keeps.” Munro grinned. “Just my sort of people.”

Ross brushed plaster dust off her clothes. She turned to Munro. “Five point two against the first two hundred, no deductions, in Swiss francs, adjusted.”

“Five point seven, and you have me.”

“Five point seven. Done.”

Munro shook hands with them, then announced that he would need a few minutes to pack his things before leaving for Nairobi.

“Just like that?” Ross asked. She seemed suddenly concerned, glancing again at her watch.

“What’s your problem?” Munro asked.

“Czech AK-47s,” she said. “In your warehouse.”

Munro showed no surprise. “Better get them out,” he said. “The consortium undoubtedly has something similar in the works, and we’ve got a lot to do in the next few hours.” As he spoke, they heard the police Kiaxons approaching from a distance. Munro said, “We’ll take the back stair.”

An hour later, they were airborne, heading toward Nairobi.

DAY 4: NAIROBI

June 16,1979

1. Timeline

IT WAS FARTHER ACROSS AFRICA FROM TANGIER TO Nairobi than it was across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to London—3,600 miles, an eight-hour flight. Ross spent the time at the computer console, working out what she called “hyperspace probability lines.”

The screen showed a computer-generated map of Africa, with streaking multicolored lines across it. “These are all timelines,” Ross said. “We can weight them for duration and delay factors.” Beneath the screen was a total-elapsed-time clock, which kept shifting numbers.

“What’s that mean?” Elliot asked.

“The computer’s picking the fastest route. You see it’s just identified a timeline that will get us on-site in six days eighteen hours and fifty—one minutes. Now it’s trying to beat that time.”

Elliot had to smile. The idea of a computer predicting to the minute when they would reach their Congo location seemed ludicrous to him. But Ross was totally serious.

As they watched, the computer clock shifted to 5 days 22 hours 24 minutes.

“Better,” Ross said, nodding. “But still not very good.” She pressed another key and the lines shifted, stretching like rubber bands over the African continent. “This is the consortium route,” she said, “based on our assumptions about the expedition. They’re going in big—thirty or more people, a full-scale undertaking. And they don’t know the exact location of the city; at least, we don’t think they know. But they have a substantial start on us, at least twelve hours, since their aircraft is already forming up in Nairobi.”

The clock registered total elapsed time: 5 days 09 hours 19 minutes. Then she pressed a button marked DATE and it shifted to 06 21 790814. “According to this, the consortium will reach the Congo site a little after eight o’clock in the morning on June 21.”

The computer clicked quietly; the lines continued to stretch and pull, and the clock read a new date: 06 21 79 1224.

“Well,” she said, “that’s where we are now. Given maximum favorable movements for us and them, the consortium will beat us to the site by slightly more than four hours, five days from now.”

Munro walked past, eating a sandwich. “Better lock another path,” he said. “Or go radical.”

“I hesitate to go radical with the ape.”

Munro shrugged. “Have to do something, with a timeline like that.”

Elliot listened to them with a vague sense of unreality: they were discussing a difference of hours, five days in the future. “But surely,” Elliot said, “over the next few days, with all the arrangements at Nairobi, and then getting into the jungle—you can’t put too much faith in those figures.”

“This isn’t like the old days of African exploration,” Ross said, “where parties disappeared into the wilds for months. At most, the computer is off by minutes—say, roughly half an hour in the total five-day projection.” She shook her head. “No. We have a problem here, and we’ve got to do something about it. The stakes are too great.”

“You mean the diamonds.”

She nodded, and pointed to the bottom of the screen, where the words BLUE CONTRACT appeared. He asked her what the Blue Contract was.

“One hell of a lot of money,” Ross said. And she added, “I think.” For in truth she did not really know.

Each new contract at ERTS was given a code name. Only Travis and the computer knew the name of the company buying the contract; everyone else at ERTS, from computer programmers to field personnel, knew the projects only by their color-code names: Red Contract, Yellow Contract, White Contract. This was a business protection for the firms involved. But the ERTS mathematicians could not resist a lively guessing game about contract sources, which was the staple of daily conversation in the company canteen.

The Blue Contract had come to ERTS in December, 1978. It called for ERTS to locate a natural source of industrial-grade diamonds in a friendly or neutralist country. The diamonds were to be Type IIb, “nitrogen-poor” crystals. No dimensions were specified, so crystal size did not matter; nor were recoverable quantities specified: the contractor would take what he could get. And, most unusual, there was no UECL.

Nearly all contracts arrived with a unit extraction cost limit. It was not enough to find a mineral source; the minerals had to be extractable at a specified unit cost. This unit cost in turn reflected the richness of the ore body, its remoteness, the availability of local labor, political conditions, the possible need to build airfields, roads, hospitals, mines, or refineries.

For a contract to come in without a UECL meant only one thing: somebody wanted blue diamonds so badly he didn’t care what they cost.

Within forty-eight hours, the ERTS canteen had explained the Blue Contract. It turned out that Type JIb diamonds were blue from trace quantities of the element boron, which rendered them worthless as gemstones but altered their electronic properties, making them semiconductors with a resistively on the order of 100 ohms centimeters. They also had light-transmissive properties.

Someone then found a brief article in Electronic News for November 17, 1978: “McPhee Doping Dropped.” It explained that the Waltham, Massachusetts, firm of Silec, Inc., had abandoned the experimental McPhee technique to dope diamonds artificially with a monolayer boron coating. The McPhee process had been abandoned as too expensive and too unreliable to produce “desirable semi conducting properties.” The article concluded that “other firms have underestimated problems in boron monolayer doping; Morikawa (Tokyo) abandoned the Nagaura process in September of this year.” Working backward, the ERTS canteen fitted additional pieces of the puzzle into place.

Back in 1971, Intec, the Santa Clara microelectronics firm, had first predicted that diamond semiconductors would be important to a future generation of “super conducting” computers in the 1980s.

The first generation of electronic computers, ENIAC and UNIVAC, built in the wartime secrecy of the 1940s, employed vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes had an average life span of twenty hours, but with thousands of glowing hot tubes in a single machine, some computers shut down every seven to twelve minutes. Vacuum-tube technology imposed a limit on the size and power of planned second-generation computers.

But the second generation never used vacuum tubes. In 1947, the invention of the transistor—a thumbnail-sized sandwich of solid material which performed all the functions of a vacuum tube—ushered in an era of “solid state” electronic devices which drew little power, generated little heat, and were smaller and more reliable than the tubes they replaced. Silicon technology provided the basis for three generations of increasingly compact, reliable, and cheap computers over the next twenty years.

But by the 1970s, computer designers began to confront the inherent limitations of silicon technology. Although circuits had been shrunk to microscopic dimensions, computation speed was still dependent on circuit length. To miniaturize circuits still more, where distances were already on the order of millionths of an inch, brought back an old problem: heat. Smaller circuits would literally melt from the heat produced. What was needed was some method to eliminate heat and reduce resistance at the same time.

It had been known since the 1950s that many metals when cooled to extremely low temperatures became “superconducting,” permitting the unimpeded flow of electrons through them. In 1977, IBM announced it was designing an ultra-high-speed computer the size of a grapefruit, chilled with liquid nitrogen. The superconducting computer required a radically new technology, and a new range of low temperature construction materials.

Doped diamonds would be used extensively throughout.

Several days later, the ERTS canteen came up with an alternative explanation. According to the new theory, the 1970s had been a decade of unprecedented growth in computers. Although the first computer manufacturers in the 1940s had predicted that four computers would do the computing work of the entire world for the foreseeable future, experts anticipated that by 1990 there would actually be one billion computers—most of them linked by communications networks to other computers. Such networks didn’t exist, and might even be theoretically impossible. (A 1975 study by the Hanover Institute concluded there was insufficient metal in the earth’s crust to construct the necessary computer transmission lines.)

According to Harvey Rumbaugh, the 1980s would be characterized by a critical shortage of computer data transmission systems: “Just as the fossil fuel shortage took the industrialized world by surprise in the 1970s, so will the data transmission shortage take the world by surprise in the next ten years. People were denied movement in the 1970s; but they will be denied information in the 1980s, and it remains to be seen which shortage will prove more frustrating.”

Laser light represented the only hope for handling these massive data requirements, since laser channels carried twenty thousand times the information of an ordinary metal coaxial trunk line. Laser transmission demanded whole new technologies—including thin-spun fiber optics, and doped semiconducting diamonds, which Rumbaugh predicted would be “more valuable than oil” in the coming years.

Even further, Rumbaugh anticipated that within ten years electricity itself would become obsolete. Future computers would utilize only light circuits, and interface with light transmission data systems. The reason was speed. “Light,” Rumbaugh said, “moves at the speed of light. Electricity doesn’t. We are living in the final years of microelectronic technology.”

Certainly microelectronics did not look like a moribund technology. In 1979, microelectronics was a major industry throughout the industrialized world, accounting for eighty billion dollars annually in the United States alone; six of the top twenty corporations in the Fortune 500 were deeply involved in microelectronics. These companies had a history of extraordinary competition and advance, over a period of less than thirty years.

In 1958, a manufacturer could fit 10 electronic components onto a single silicon chip. By 1970, it was possible to fit 100 units onto a chip of the same size—a tenfold increase in slightly more than a decade.

But by 1972, it was possible to fit 1,000 units on a chip, and by 1974, 10,000 units. It was expected that by 1980, there would be one million units on a single chip the size of a thumbnail, but, using electronic photo projection, this goal was actually realized in 1978. By the spring of 1979, the new goal was ten million units—or, even better, one billion units— on a single silicon chip by 1980. But nobody expected to wait past June or July of 1979 for this development.

Such advances within an industry are unprecedented. Comparison to older manufacturing technologies makes this clear. Detroit was content to make trivial product design changes at three-year intervals, but the electronics industry routinely expected order of magnitude advances in the same time. (To keep pace, Detroit would have had to increase automobile gas mileage from 8 miles per gallon in 1970 to 80,000,000 miles per gallon in 1979. Instead, Detroit went from 8 to 16 miles per gallon during that time, further evidence of the coming demise of the automotive industry as the center of the American economy.)

In such a competitive market, everyone worried about foreign powers, particularly Japan, which since 1973 had maintained a Japanese Cultural Exchange in San Jose—which some considered a cover organization for well-financed industrial espionage.

The Blue Contract could only be understood in the light of an industry making major advances every few months. Travis had said that the Blue Contract was “the biggest thing we’ll see in the next ten years. Whoever finds those diamonds has a jump on the technology for at least five years. Five years. Do you know what that means?”

Ross knew what it meant. In an industry where competitive edges were measured in months, companies had made fortunes by beating competitors by a matter of weeks with some new techniques or device; Syntel in California had been the first to make a 256K memory chip while everyone else was still making 16K chips and dreaming of 64K chips. Syntel kept their advantage for only sixteen weeks, but realized a profit of more than a hundred and thirty million dollars.

“And we’re talking about five years,” Travis said. “That’s an advantage measured in billions of dollars, maybe tens of billions of dollars. If we can get to those diamonds.”

These were the reasons for the extraordinary pressure Ross felt as she continued to work with the computer. At the age of twenty-four, she was team leader in a high-technology race involving a half-dozen nations around the globe, all secretly pitting their business and industrial resources against one another.

The stakes made any conventional race seem ludicrous. Travis told her before she left, “Don’t be afraid when the pressure makes you crazy. You have billions of dollars riding on your shoulders. Just do the best you can.”

Doing the best she could, she managed to reduce the expedition timeline by another three hours and thirty-seven minutes—but they were still slightly behind the consortium projection. Not too far to make up the time, especially with Munro’s cold-blooded shortcuts, but nevertheless behind— which could mean total disaster in a winner-take-all race.

And then she received bad news.

The screen printed PIGGYBACK SLURP / ALL BETS OFF.

“Hell,” Ross said. She felt suddenly tired. Because if there really had been a piggyback slurp, their chances of winning the race were vanishing—before any of them had even set foot in the rain forests of central Africa.

2. Piggyback Slurp

TRAVIS FELT LIKE A FOOL.

He stared at the hard copy from Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.

ERTS WHY ARE YOU SENDING US ALL THIS MUKENKO DATA WE DON’T REALLY CARE THANKS ANYWAY.

That had arrived an hour ago from GSFC/Maryland, but it was already too late by more than five hours.

“Damn!” Travis said, staring at the telex.

The first indication to Travis that anything was wrong was when the Japanese and Germans broke off negotiations with Munro in Tangier. One minute they had been willing to pay anything; the next minute they could hardly wait to leave. The break-off had come abruptly, discontinuously; it implied the sudden introduction of new data into the consortium computer files.

New data from where?

There could be only one explanation—and now it was confirmed in the GSFC telex from Greenbelt.

ERTS WHY ARE YOU SENDING ALL THIS MUKENKO DATA

There was a simple answer to that: ERTS wasn‘t sending any data. At least, not willingly. ERTS and GSFC had an arrangement to exchange data updates—Travis had made that deal in 1978 to obtain cheaper satellite imagery from orbiting Landsats. Satellite imagery was his company’s single greatest expense. In return for a look at derived ERTS data, GSFC agreed to supply satellite CCTs at 30 percent below gross rate.

It seemed like a good deal at the time, and the coded locks were specified in the agreement.

But now the potential drawbacks loomed large before Travis; his worst fears were confirmed. Once you put a line over two thousand miles from Houston to Greenbelt, you begged for a piggyback data slurp. Somewhere between Texas and Maryland someone had inserted a terminal linkup—probably in the carrier telephone lines—and had begun to slurp out data on a piggyback terminal. This was the form of industrial espionage they most feared.

A piggyback-slurp terminal tapped in between two legitimate terminals, monitoring the back and forth transmissions. After a time, the piggyback operator knew enough to begin making transmissions on line, slurping out data from both ends, pretending to be GSFC to Houston, and Houston to GSFC. The piggyback terminal could continue to function until one or both legitimate terminals realized that they were being slurped.

Now the question was: how much data had been slurped out in the last seventy-two hours?

He had called for twenty-four-hour scanner checks, and the readings were disheartening. It looked as though the ERTS computer had yielded up not only original database elements, but also data-transformation histories—the sequence of operations performed on the data by ERTS over the last four weeks.

If that was true, it meant that the Euro-Japanese consortium piggyback knew what transformations ERTS had carried out on the Mukenko data—and therefore they knew where the lost city was located, with pinpoint accuracy. They now knew the location of the city as precisely as Ross did.

Timelines had to be adjusted, unfavorably to the ERTS team. And the updated computer projections were unequivocal—Ross or no Ross, the likelihood of the ERTS team reaching the site ahead of the Japanese and Germans was flow almost nil.

From Travis’s viewpoint, the entire ERTS expedition was mow a futile exercise, and a waste of time. There was no hope of success. The only unfactorable element was the gorilla Amy, and Travis’s instincts told him that a gorilla named Amy would not prove decisive in the discovery of mineral deposits in the northeastern Congo.

It was hopeless.

Should he recall the ERTS team? He stared at the console by his desk. “Call cost-time,” he said.

The computer blinked COST—TIME AVAILABLE.

“Congo Field Survey,” he said.

The screen printed out numbers for the Congo Field Survey: expenditures by the hour, accumulated costs, committed future costs, cutoff points, future branch-point deletions. . . . The project was now just outside Nairobi, and was running at an accumulated cost of slightly over

$189,000.

Cancellation would cost $227,455.

“Factor BF,” he said.

The screen changed. B F. He now saw a series of probabilities. “Factor BF” was bona fortuna, good luck—the imponderable in all expeditions, especially remote, dangerous expeditions.

THINKING A MOMENT, the computer flashed.

Travis waited. He knew that the computer would require several seconds to perform the computations to assign weights to random factors that might influence the expedition, still five or more days from the target site.

His beeper buzzed. Rogers, the tap dancer, said, “We’ve traced the piggyback slurp. It’s in Norman, Oklahoma, nominally at the North Central Insurance Corporation of America. NCIC is fifty-one percent owned by a Hawaiian holding company, Halekuli, Inc., which is in turn owned by mainland Japanese interests. What do you want?”

“I want a very bad fire,” Travis said.

“Got you,” Rogers said. He hung up the phone.

The screen flashed ASSESSED FACTOR B F and a probability: .449. He was surprised: that figure meant that ERTS had an almost even chance of attaining the target site befure the consortium. Travis didn’t question the mathematics; .449 was good enough.

The ERTS expedition would continue to the Congo, at least for the time being. And in the meantime he would do whatever he could to slow down the consortium. Off the top of his head, Travis could think of one or two ideas to accomplish that.

3. Additional Data

THE JET WAS MOVING SOUTH OVER LAKE RUDOLPH in northern Kenya when Tom Seamans called Elliot.

Seamails had finished his computer analysis to discriminate gorillas from other apes, principally chimpanzees. He had then obtained from Houston a videotape of three seconds of a garbled video transmission which seemed to show a gorilla smashing a dish antenna and staring into a camera.

“Well?” Elliot said, looking at the computer screen. The data flashed up:

DISCRIMINANT FUNCTION GORILLA/CHIMP

FUN CT IONAL GROUPINGS DISTRIBUTED AS:

GORILLA:   .9934

CHIMP:       .1132

TEST VIDEOTAPE (HOUSTON): .3349

“Hell,” Elliot said. At those figures, the study was equivocal, useless.

“Sorry about that,” Seamans said over the phone. “But part of the trouble comes from the test material itself. We had to factor in the computer derivation of that image. The image has been cleaned up, and that means it’s been regularized; the critical stuff has been lost. I’d like to work with the original digitized matrix. Can you get me that?”

Karen Ross was nodding yes. “Sure,” Elliot said.

“I’ll go another round with it,” Seamans said. “But if you want my gut opinion, it is never going to turn out. The fact is that gorillas show a considerable individual variation in facial structure, just as people do. If we increase our sample base, we’re going to get more variation, and a larger population interval. I think you’re stuck. You can never prove it’s not a gorilla—but for my money, it’s not.”

“Meaning what?” Elliot asked.

“It’s something new,” Seamans said. “I’m telling you, if this was really a gorilla, it would have showed up .89 or .94, somewhere in there, on this function. But the image comes out at .39. That’s just not good enough. It’s not a gorilla, Peter.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s a transitional form. I ran a function to measure where the variation was. You know what was the major differential? Skin color. Even in black-and-white, it’s not dark enough to be a gorilla, Peter. This is a whole new animal, I promise you.”

Elliot looked at Ross. “What does this do to your timeline?”

“For the moment, nothing,” she said. “Other elements are more critical, and this is unfactorable.”

The pilot clicked on the intercom. “We are beginning our descent into Nairobi,” he said.

4. Nairobi

FIVE MILES OUTSIDE NAIROBI, ONE CAN FIND WILD game of the East African savannah. And within the memory of many Nairobi residents the game could be found closer still—gazelles, buffalo, and giraffe wandering around backyards, and the occasional leopard slipping into one’s bedroom. In those days, the city still retained the character of a wild colonial station; in its heyday, Nairobi was a fast-living place indeed: “Are you married or do you live in Kenya?” went the standard question. The men were hard-drinking and rough, the women beautiful and loose, and the pattern of life no more predictable than the fox hunts that ranged over the rugged countryside each weekend.

But modern Nairobi is almost’ unrecognizable from the time of those freewheeling colonial days. The few remaining Victorian buildings lie stranded in a modem city of half a million, with traffic jams, stoplights, skyscrapers, supermarkets, same-day dry cleaners, French restaurants, and air pollution.

The ERTS cargo plane landed at Nairobi International Airport at dawn on the morning of June 16, and Munro contacted porters and assistants for the expedition. They intended to leave Nairobi within two hours—until Travis called from Houston to inform them that Peterson, one of the geologists on the first Congo expedition, had somehow made it back to Nairobi.

Ross was excited by the news. “Where is he now?” she asked.

“At the morgue,” Travis said.

Elliot winced as he came close: the body on the stainless steel table was a blond man his own age. The man’s arms had been crushed; the skin was swollen, a ghastly purple color. He glanced at Ross. She seemed perfectly cool, not blinking or turning away. The pathologist stepped on a foot petal, activating a microphone overhead. “Would you state your name, please.”

“Karen Ellen Ross.”

“Your nationality and passport number?”

“American, F 1413649.”

“Can you identify the man before you, Miss Ross?”

“Yes,” she said. “He is James Robert Peterson.”

“What is your relation to the deceased James Robert Peterson?”

“I worked with him,” she said dully. She seemed to be examining a geological specimen, scrutinizing it unemotionally. Her face showed no reaction.

The pathologist faced the microphone. “Identity confirmed as James Robert Peterson, male Caucasian, twenty-nine years old, nationality American. “ He turned back to Ross. “When was the last time you saw Mr. Peterson?”

“In May of this year. He was leaving for the Congo.”

“You have not seen him in the last month?”

“No,” she said. “What happened?”

The pathologist touched the puffy purple injuries on his arms. His fingertips sank in, leaving indentations like teeth in the flesh. “Damned strange story,” the pathologist said.

The previous day, June 15, Peterson had been flown to Nairobi airport aboard a small charter cargo plane, in end-stage terminal shock. He died several hours later without regaining consciousness. “Extraordinary he made it at all. Apparently the aircraft made an unscheduled stop for a mechanical problem at Garona field, a dirt track in Zaire. And then this fellow comes stumbling out of the woods, collapsing at their feet.” The pathologist pointed out that the bones had been shattered in both arms. The injuries, he explained, were not new; they had occurred at least four days earlier, perhaps more. “He must have been in incredible pain.”

Elliot said, “What could cause that injury?”

The pathologist had never seen anything like it. “Superficially, it resembles mechanical trauma, a crush injury from an automobile or truck. We see a good deal of those here; but mechanical crush injuries are never bilateral, as they are in this case.”

“So it wasn’t a mechanical injury?” Karen Ross asked.

“Don’t know what it was. It’s unique in my experience,” the pathologist said briskly. “We also found traces of blood under his nails, and a few strands of gray hair. We’re running a test now.”

Across the room, another pathologist looked up from his microscope. “The hair is definitely not human. Cross section doesn’t match. Some kind of animal hair, close to human.”

“The cross section?” Ross said.

“Best index we have of hair origin,” the pathologist said. “For instance, human pubic hair is more elliptical in cross section than other body hair, or facial hair. It’s quite characteristic—admissible in court. But especially in this laboratory, we come across a great deal of animal hair, and we’re expert in that as well.”

A large stainless-steel analyzer began pinging. “Blood’s coming through,” the pathologist said.

On a video screen they saw twin patterns of pastel-colored streaks. “This is the electrophoresis pattern,” the pathologist explained. “To check serum proteins. That’s ordinary human blood on the left. On the right we have the blood sample from under the nails. You can see it’s definitely not human blood.”

“Not human blood?” Ross said, glancing at Elliot.

“It’s close to human blood,” the pathologist said, staring at the pattern. “But it’s not human. Could be a domestic or farm animal—a pig, perhaps. Or else a primate. Monkeys and apes are very close serologically to human beings. We’ll have a computer analysis in a minute.”

On the screen, the computer printed ALPHA AND BETA SERUM GLOBULINS MATCH: GORILLA BLOOD.

The pathologist said, “There’s your answer to what he had under his nails. Gorilla blood.”

5. Examination

“SHE WON’T HURT YOU,” ELLIOT TOLD THE frightened orderly. They were in the passenger compartment of the 747 cargo jet. “See, she’s smiling at you.”

Amy was indeed giving her most winning smile, being careful not to expose her teeth. But the orderly from the private clinic in Nairobi was not familiar with these fine points of gorilla etiquette. His hands shook as he held the syringe.

Nairobi was the last opportunity for Amy to receive a thorough checkup. Her large, powerful body belied a constitutional fragility, as her heavy-browed, glowering face belied a meek, rather tender nature. In San Francisco, the Project Amy staff subjected her to a thorough medical regimen— urine samples every other day, stool samples checked weekly for occult blood, complete blood studies monthly, and a trip to the dentist every three months for removal of the black tartar that accumulated from her vegetarian diet.

Amy took it all in stride, but the terrified orderly did not know that. He approached her holding the syringe in front of him like a weapon. “You sure he won’t bite?”

Amy, trying to be helpful, signed, Amy promise no bite. She was signing slowly, deliberately, as she always did when confronted by someone who did not know her language.

“She promises not to bite you,” Elliot said.

“So you say,” the orderly said. Elliot did not bother to explain that he hadn’t said it; she had.

After the blood samples were drawn, the orderly relaxed a little. Packing up, he said, “Certainly is an ugly brute.”

“You’ve hurt her feelings,” Elliot said.

And, indeed, Amy was signing vigorously, What ugly? “Nothing, Amy,” Elliot said. “He’s just never seen a gorilla before.”

The orderly said, “I beg your pardon?”

“You’ve hurt her feelings. You’d better apologize.”

The orderly snapped his medical case shut. He stared at Elliot and then at Amy. “Apologize to him?”

“Her,” Elliot said. “Yes. How would you like to be told you’re ugly?”

Elliot felt strongly about this. Over the years, he had come to feel acutely the prejudices that human beings showed toward apes, considering chimpanzees to be cute children, orangs to be wise old men, and gorillas to be hulking, dangerous brutes. They were wrong in every case.

Each of these animals was unique, and did not fit the human stereotypes at all. Chimps, for example, were much more callous than gorillas ever were. Because chimps were extroverts, an angry chimp was far more dangerous than an angry gorilla; at the zoo, Elliot would watch in amazement as human mothers pushed their children closer to look at the chimps, but recoiled protectively at the sight of the gorillas. These mothers obviously did not know that wild chimpanzees caught and ate human infants—something gorillas never did.

Elliot had witnessed repeatedly the human prejudice against gorillas, and had come to recognize its effect on Amy. Amy could not help the fact that she was huge and black and heavy-browed and squash-faced. Behind the face people considered so repulsive was an intelligent and sensitive consciousness, sympathetic to the people around her, It pained her when people ran away, or screamed in fear, or made cruel remarks.

The orderly frowned. “You mean that he understands English?”

“Yes, she does.” The gender change was something else

Elliot didn’t like. People who were afraid of Amy always assumed she was male.

The orderly shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

“Amy, show the man to the door.”

Amy lumbered over to the door and opened it for the orderly, whose eyes widened as he left. Amy closed the door behind him.

Silly human man, Amy signed.

“Never mind,” Elliot said. “Come, Peter tickle Amy.” And for the next fifteen minutes, he tickled her as she rolled on the floor and grunted in deep satisfaction. Elliot never noticed the door open behind him, never noticed the shadow falling across the floor, until it was too late and he turned his head to look up and saw the dark cylinder swing down, and his head erupted with blinding white pain and everything went black.

       6. Kidnapped

HE AWOKE TO A PIERCING ELECTRONIC SHRIEK.

“Don’t move, sir,” a voice said.

Elliot opened his eyes and stared into a bright light shining down on him. He was still lying on his back in the aircraft; someone was bent over him.

“Look to the right. . . now to the left. . . . Can you flex your fingers?”

He followed the instructions. The light was taken away and he saw a black man in a white suit crouched beside him. The man touched Elliot’s head; his fingers came away red with blood. “Nothing to be alarmed about,” the man said; “it’s quite superficial.” He looked off. “How long would you estimate he was unconscious?”

“Couple of minutes, no more,” Munro said.

The high-pitched squeal came again. He saw Ross moving around the passenger section, wearing a shoulder pack, and holding a wand in front of her. There was another squeal. “Damn,” she said, and plucked something from the molding around the window. “That’s five. They really did a job.”

Munro looked down at Elliot. “How do you feel?” he asked.

“He should be put under observation for twenty-four hours,” the black man said. “Just as a precaution.”

“Twenty-four hours!” Ross said, moving around the compartment.

Elliot said, “Where is she?”

“They took her,” Munro said. “They opened the rear door, inflated the pneumatic slide, and were gone before anyone realized what happened. We found this next to you.”

Munro gave him a small glass vial with Japanese markings. The sides of the vial were scratched and scored; at one end was a rubber plunger, at the other end a broken needle.

Elliot sat up.

“Easy there,” the doctor said.

“I feel fine,” Elliot said, although his head was throbbing. He turned the vial over in his hand. “There was frost on it when you found it?”

Munro nodded. “Very cold.”

“CO₂,” Elliot said. It was a dart from a gas gun. He shook his head. “They broke the needle off in her.” He could imagine Amy’s screams of outrage. She was unaccustomed to anything but the tenderest treatment. Perhaps that was one of the shortcomings of his work with her; he had not prepared her well enough for the real world. He sniffed the vial, smelled a pungent odor. “Lobaxin. Fast-acting soporific, onset within fifteen seconds. It’s what they’d use.” Elliot was angry. Lobaxin was not often used on animals because it caused liver damage. And they had broken the needle— He got to his feet and leaned on Munro, who put his arm

around him. The doctor protested.

“I’m fine,” Elliot said.

Across the room, there was another squeal, this one loud and prolonged. Ross was moving her wand over the medicine cabinet, past the bottles of pills and supplies. The sound seemed to embarrass her; quickly she moved away, shutting the cabinet.

She crossed the passenger compartment, and a squeal was heard again. Ross removed a small black device from the underside of one seat. “Look at this. They must have brought an extra person just to plant the bugs. It’ll take hours to sterilize the plane. We can’t wait~”

She went immediately to the computer console and began typing.

Elliot said, “Where are they now? The consortium?”

“The main party left from Kubala airport outside Nairobi six hours ago,” Munro said.

“Then they didn’t take Amy with them.”

“Of course they didn’t take her,” Ross said, sounding annoyed. “They’ve got no use for her.”

“Have they killed her?” Elliot asked.

“Maybe,” Munro said quietly.

“Oh, Jesus . .

“But I doubt it,” Munro continued. “They don’t want any publicity, and Amy’s famous—as famous in some circles as an ambassador or a head of state. She’s a talking gorilla, and there aren’t many of those. She’s been on television news, she’s had her picture in the newspapers. . . . They’d kill you before they killed her.”

“Just so they don’t kill her,” Elliot said.

“They won’t,” Ross said, with finality. “The consortium isn’t interested in Amy. They don’t even know why we brought her. They’re just trying to blow our timeline—but they won’t succeed.”

Something in her tone suggested that she planned to leave Amy behind. The idea appalled Elliot. “We’ve got to get her back,” he said. “Amy is my responsibility, I can’t possibly abandon her here—”

“Seventy-two minutes,” Ross said, pointing to the screen. “We have exactly one hour and twelve minutes before we blow the timeline.” She turned to Munro. “And we have to switch over to the second contingency.”

“Fine,” Munro said. “I’ll get the men working on it.”

“In a new plane,” Ross said. “We can’t take this one, it’s contaminated.” She was punching in call letters to the computer console, her fingers clicking on the keys. “We’ll take it straight to point M,” Ross said. “Okay?”

“Absolutely,” Munro said.

Elliot said, “I won’t leave Amy. If you’re going to leave her behind, you’ll have to leave me as well—” Elliot stopped.

Printed on the screen was the message FORGET GORILLA PROCEED TO NEXT CHECKPOINT URGENT APE NOT SIGNIFICANT TIMELINE OUTCOME COMPUTER VERIFICATION REPEAT PROCEED WITHOUT AMY.

“You can’t leave her behind,” Elliot said. “I’ll stay behind, too.”

“Let me tell you something,” Ross said. “I never believed that Amy was important to this expedition—or you either. From the very beginning she was just a diversion. When I came to San Francisco, I was followed. You and Amy provided a diversion. You threw the consortium into a spin. It was worth it. Now it’s not worth it. We’ll leave you both behind if we have to. I couldn’t care less.”

7. Bugs

“WELL, GODDAMN IT,” ELLIOT BEGAN, “DO YOU mean to tell me that. . .”

“That’s right,” Ross said coldly. “You’re expendable.” But even as she spoke, she grabbed his arm firmly and led him out of the airplane while she held her finger to her lips.

Elliot realized that she intended to pacify him in private, Amy was his responsibility, and to hell with all the diamonds and international intrigue. Outside on the concrete runway he repeated stubbornly, “I’m not leaving without Amy.”

“Neither am I.” Ross walked quickly across the runway toward a police helicopter.

Elliot hurried to catch up. “What?”

“Don’t you understand anything?” Ross said. “That airplane's not clean. It’s full of bugs, and the consortium’s listening in. I made that speech for their benefit.”

“But who was following you in San Francisco?”

“Nobody. They’re going to spend hours trying to figure out who was.”

“Amy and I weren’t just a diversion?”

“Not at all,” she said. “Look: we don’t know what happened to the last ERTS Congo team, but no matter what you or Travis or anyone else says, I think gorillas were involved. And I think that Amy will help us when we get there.”

“As an ambassador?”

“We need information,” Ross said. “And she knows more about gorillas than we do.”

“But can you find her in an hour and ten minutes?”

“Hell, no,” Ross said, checking her watch. “This won’t take more than twenty minutes.”

“Lower! Lower!”

Ross was shouting into her radio headset as she sat alongside the police helicopter pilot. The helicopter was circling the tower of Government House, turning and moving north, toward the Hilton.

“This is not acceptable, madam,” the pilot said politely. “We fly below airspace limitations.”

“You’re too damn high!” Ross said. She was looking at a box on her knees, with four compass-point digital readouts. She flicked switches quickly, while the radio crackled with angry complaints from Nairobi tower.

“East now, due east,” she instructed, and the helicopter tilted and moved east, toward the poor outskirts of the city.

In the back, Elliot felt his stomach twist with each banking turn on the helicopter. His head pounded and he felt awful, but he had insisted on coming. He was the only person knowledgeable enough to minister to Amy if she was in medical trouble.

Now, sitting alongside the pilot, Ross said, “Get a reading,” and she pointed to the northeast. The helicopter thumped over crude shacks, junked automobile lots, dirt roads. “Slower now, slower. .

The readouts glowed, the numbers shifting. Elliot saw them all go to zero, simultaneously.

“Down!” Ross shouted, and the helicopter descended in the center of a vast garbage dump.

The pilot remained with the helicopter; his final words were disquieting. “Where there’s garbage, there’s rats,” he said.

“Rats don’t bother me,” Ross said, climbing out with her box in her hand.

“Where there’s rats, there’s cobras,” the pilot said.

“Oh,” Ross said.

She crossed the dump with Elliot. There was a stiff breeze; papers and debris ruffled at their feet. Elliot’s head ached, and the odors arising from the dump nauseated him.

“Not far now,” Ross said, watching the box. She was excited, glancing at her watch.

“Here?”

She bent over and picked through the trash, her hand making circles, digging deeper in frustration, elbow-deep in the trash.

Finally she came up with a necklace—a necklace she had given Amy when they first boarded the airplane in San Francisco. She turned it over, examining the plastic name tag on it, which Elliot noticed was unusually thick. There were fresh scratches on the back.

“Hell,” Ross said. “Sixteen minutes shot.” And she hurried back to the waiting helicopter.

Elliot fell into step beside her. “But how can you find her if they got rid of her necklace bug?”

“Nobody,” Ross said, “plants only one bug. This was just a decoy, they were supposed to find it.” She pointed to the scratches on the back. “But they’re clever, they reset the frequencies.”

“Maybe they got rid of the second bug, too,” Elliot said.

“They didn’t,” Ross said. The helicopter lifted off, a thundering whirr of blades, and the paper and trash of the dump swirled in circles beneath them. She pressed her mouthpiece to her lips and said to the pilot, “Take me to the largest scrap metal source in Nairobi.”

Within nine minutes, they had picked up another very weak signal, located within an automobile junkyard. The helicopter landed in the street outside, drawing dozens of shouting children. Ross went with Elliot into the junkyard, moving past the rusting hulks of cars and trucks.

“You’re sure she’s here?” Elliot said.

“No question. They have to surround her with metal, it’s the only thing they can do.”

“Why?”

“Shielding.” She picked her way around the broken cars, pausing frequently to refer to her electronic box.

Then Elliot heard a grunt.

It came from inside an ancient rust-red Mercedes bus. Elliot climbed through the shattered doors, the rubber gaskets crumbling in his hands, into the interior. He found Amy on her back, tied with adhesive tape. She was groggy, but complained loudly when he tore the tape off her hair.

He located the broken needle in her right chest and plucked it out with forceps, Amy shrieked, then hugged him. He heard the far-off whine of a police siren.

“It’s all right, Amy, it’s all right,” he said. He set her down and examined her more carefully. She seemed to be okay.

And then he said, “Where’s the second bug?”

Ross grinned. “She swallowed it.”

Now that Amy was safe, Elliot felt a wave of anger. “You made her swallow it? An electronic bug? Don’t you realize that she is a very delicate animal and her health is extremely precarious—”

“Don’t get worked up,” Ross said. “Remember the vitamins I gave you? You swallowed one, too.” She glanced at her watch. “Thirty-two minutes,” she said. “Not bad at all. We have forty minutes before we have to leave Nairobi.”

8. Present Point

MUNRO SAT IN THE 747, PUNCHING KEYS ON THE computer. He watched as the lines crisscrossed over the maps, ticking out datalines, timelines, information lock coordinates.

The computer ran through possible expedition routines quickly, testing a new one every ten seconds. After each data fit, outcomes were printed—cost, logistical difficulties, supply problems, total elapsed times from Houston, from Present Point (Nairobi), where they were now.

Looking for a solution.

It wasn’t like the old days, Munro thought. Even five years ago, expeditions were still run on guesswork and luck. But now every expedition employed real-time computer planning; Munro had long since been forced to learn BASIC and TW/GESHUND and other major interactive languages. Nobody did it by the seat of the pants anymore. The business had changed.

Munro had decided to join the ERTS expedition precisely because of those changes. Certainly he hadn’t joined because of Karen Ross, who was stubborn and inexperienced. But ERTS had the most elaborate working database, and the most sophisticated planning programs. In the long run, he expected those programs to make the crucial difference. And he liked a smaller team; once the consortium was in the field, their working party of thirty was going to prove unwieldy.

But he had to find a faster timeline to get them in. Munro pressed the buttons, watching the data flash up. He set trajectories, intersections, junctions. Then, with a practiced eye, he began to eliminate alternatives. He closed out pathways, shut down airfields, eliminated truck routes, avoided river crossings.

The computer kept coming back with reduced times, but from Present Point (Nairobi) the total elapsed times were always too long. The best projection beat the consortium by thirty-seven minutes—which was nothing to rely on. He frowned, and smoked a cigar. Perhaps if he crossed the Liko River at Mugana.

He punched the buttons.

It didn’t help. Crossing the Liko was slower. He tried trekking through the Goroba Valley, even though it was probably too hazardous to execute.

PROPOSED ROUTING EXCESSIVELY HAZARDOUS

“Great minds think alike,” Munro said, smoking his cigar. But it started him wondering: were there other, unorthodox approaches they had overlooked? And then he had an idea.

The others wouldn’t like it, but it might work. .

Munro called the logistics equipment list. Yes, they were equipped for it. He punched in the routing, smiling as he saw the line streak straight across Africa, within a few miles of their destination. He called for outcomes.

PROPOSED ROUTING UNACCEPTABLE.

He pressed the override button, got the data outcomes anyway. It was just as he thought—they could beat the consortium by a full forty hours. Nearly two full days!

The computer went back to the previous statement:

PROPOSED ROUTING UNACCEPTABLE / ALTITUDE FACTORS / HAZARDS TO PERSONNEL EXCESSIVE / PROBABILITY SUCCESS UNDER LIMITS /

Munro didn’t think that was true. He thought they could pull it off, especially if the weather was good. The altitude wouldn’t be a problem, and the ground although rough would be reasonably yielding.

In fact, the more Munro thought about it, the more certain he was that it would work.

       9. Departure

THE LITTLE FOKKER S-144 PROP PLANE WAS PULLED up alongside the giant 747 cargo jet, like an infant nursing at its mother’s breast. Two cargo ramps were in constant motion as men transferred equipment from the larger plane to the smaller one. Returning to the airfield, Ross explained to hot that they would be taking the smaller plane, since the 747 had to be debugged, and since it was “too large” for their needs now.

“But the jet must be faster,” Elliot said.

“Not necessarily,” Ross said, but she did not explain further.

In any case, things were now happening very fast, and Elliot had other concerns. He helped Amy aboard the Fokker, and checked her thoroughly. She seemed to be bruised all over her body—at least she complained that everything hurt when he touched her—but she had no broken bones, and she was in good spirits.

Several black men were loading equipment into the airplane, laughing and slapping each other on the back, having a fine time. Amy was intrigued with the men, demanding to know What joke ? But they ignored her, concentrating on the work at hand. And she was still groggy from her medication. Soon she fell asleep.

Ross supervised the loading, and Elliot moved toward the rear of the plane, where she was talking with a jolly black man, whom she introduced as Kahega.

“Ah,” Kahega said, shaking Elliot’s hand. “Dr. Elliot. Dr. Ross and Dr. Elliot, two doctors, very excellent.”

Elliot was not sure why it was excellent.

Kahega laughed infectiously. “Very good cover,” he announced. “Not like the old days with Captain Munro. Now two doctors—a medical mission, yes? Very excellent. Where are the ‘medical supplies’?” He cocked an eyebrow.

“We have no medical supplies.” Ross sighed.

“Oh, very excellent, Doctor, I like your manner,” Kahega said. “You are American, yes? We take what, M-16s? Very good rifle, M-16. I prefer it myself.”

“Kahega thinks we are running guns,” Ross said. “He just can’t believe we aren’t.”

Kahega was laughing. “You are with Captain Munro!” he said, as if this explained everything. And then he went off to see about the other workmen.

“You sure we aren’t running guns?” Elliot asked when they were alone.

“We’re after something more valuable than guns,” Ross said. She was repacking the equipment, working quickly. Elliot asked if he could help, but she shook her head. “I’ve got to do this myself. We have to get it down to forty pounds per person.”

“Forty pounds? For everything?”

“That’s what the computer projection allows. Munro’s brought in Kahega and seven other Kikuya assistants. With the three of us, that makes eleven people all together, plus Amy—she gets her full forty pounds. But it means a total of four hundred eighty pounds.” Ross continued to weigh packs and parcels of food.

The news gave Elliot serious misgivings. The expedition was taking yet another turn, into still greater danger. His immediate desire to back out was checked by his memory of the video screen, and the gray gorilla like creature that he suspected was a new, unknown animal. That was a discovery worth risk. He stared out the window at the porters. “They’re Kikuyu?”

“Yes,” she said. “They’re good porters, even if they never shut up. Kikuyu tribesmen love to talk. They’re all brothers, by the way, so be careful what you say. I just hope Munro didn’t have to tell them too much.”

“The Kikuyu?”

“No, the NCNA.”

“The NCNA,” Elliot repeated.

“The Chinese. The Chinese are very interested in computers and electronic technology,” Ross said. “Munro must be telling them something in exchange for the advice they’re giving him.” She gestured to the window, and Elliot looked out. Sure enough, Munro stood under the shadow of the 747 wing, talking with four Chinese men.

“Here,” Ross said, “stow these in that corner.” She pointed to three large Styrofoam cartons marked AMERICAN SPORT DIVERS, LAKE ELSINORE, CALIF.

“We doing underwater work?” Elliot asked, puzzled.

But Ross wasn’t paying attention. “I just wish I knew what he was telling them,” she said. But as it turned out, Ross needn’t have worried, for Munro paid the Chinese in something more valuable to them than electronics information.

The Fokker lifted off from the Nairobi runway at 14:24 hours, three minutes ahead of their new timeline schedule.

During the sixteen hours following Amy’s recovery, the ERTS expedition traveled 560 miles across the borders of four countries—Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Zaire—as they went from Nairobi to the Barawana Forest, at the edge of the Congo rain forest. The logistics of this complex move would have been impossible without the assistance of an outside ally. Munro said that he “had friends in low places,” and in this case he had turned to the Chinese Secret Service, in Tanzania.

The Chinese had been active in Africa since the early 1960s, when their spy networks attempted to influence the course of the Congolese civil war because China wanted access to the Congo’s rich supplies of uranium. Field operatives were run out of the Bank of China or, more commonly, the New China News Agency. Munro had dealt with a number of NCNA “war correspondents” when he was running arms from 1963 to 1968, and he had never lost his contacts.

The Chinese financial commitment to Africa was considerable. In the late 1960s, more than half of China’s two billion dollars in foreign aid went to African nations. An equal sum was spent secretly; in 1973, Mao Tse-tung complained publicly about the money he had wasted trying to overthrow the Zaire government of President Mobutu.

The Chinese mission in Africa was meant to counter the Russian influence, but since World War lithe Chinese bore no great love for the Japanese, and Munro’s desire to beat the Euro-Japanese consortium fell on sympathetic ears. To celebrate the alliance, Munro had brought three grease-stained cardboard cartons from Hong Kong.

The two chief Chinese operatives in Africa, Li T’ao and Liu Shu-wen, were both from Hunan province. They found their African posting tedious because of the bland African food, and gratefully accepted Munro’s gift of a case of tree ears fungus, a case of hot bean sauce, and a case of chili paste with garlic. The fact that these spices came from neutral Hong Kong, and were not the inferior condiments produced in Taiwan, was a subtle point; in any case, the gift struck exactly the proper note for an informal exchange.

NCNA operatives assisted Munro with paperwork, some difficult-to-obtain equipment, and information. The Chinese possessed excellent maps, and remarkably detailed information about conditions along the northeast Zaire border— since they were assisting the Tanzanian troops invading Uganda. The Chinese had told him that the jungle rivers were flooding, and had advised him to procure a balloon for crossings. But Munro did not bother to take their advice; indeed, he seemed to have some plan to reach his destination without crossing any rivers at all. Although how, the Chinese could not imagine.

At 10 P.M. on June 16, the Fokker stopped to refuel at Rawamagena airport, outside Kigali in Rwanda. The local traffic control officer boarded the plane with a clipboard and forms, asking their next destination. Munro said that it was Rawamagena airport, meaning that the aircraft would make a loop, then return.

Elliot frowned. “But we’re going to land somewhere in the—”

“Sh-h-h,” Ross said, shaking her head. “Leave it alone.”

Certainly the traffic officer seemed content with this flight plan; once the pilot signed the clipboard, he departed. Ross explained that flight controllers in Rwanda were accustomed to aircraft that did not file full plans. “He just wants to know when the plane will be back at his field. The rest is none of his business.”

Rawamagena airport was sleepy; they had to wait two hours for petrol to be brought, yet the normally impatient Ross waited quietly. And Munro dozed, equally indifferent to the delay.

“What about the timeline?” Elliot asked.

“No problem,” she said. “We can’t leave for three hours anyway. We need the light over Mukenko.”

“That’s where the airfield is?” Elliot asked.

“If you call it an airfield,” Munro said, and he pulled his safari hat down over his eyes and went back to sleep.

This worried Elliot until Ross explained to him that most outlying African airfields were just dirt strips cut into the bush. The pilots couldn’t land at night, or in the foggy morning, because there were often animals on the field, or encamped nomads, or another plane that had put down and was unable to take off again. “We need the light,” she explained. “That’s why we’re waiting. Don’t worry: it’s all factored in.”

Elliot accepted her explanation, and went back to check on Amy. Ross sighed. “Don’t you think we’d better tell him?” she asked.

“Why?” Munro said, not lifting his hat.

“Maybe there’s a problem with Amy.”

“I’ll take care of Amy,” Munro said.

“It’s going to upset Elliot when he finds out,” Ross said.

“Of course it’s going to upset him,” Munro said. “But there’s no point upsetting him until we have to. After all, what’s this jump worth to us?”

“Forty hours, at least. It’s dangerous, but it’ll give us a whole new timeline. We could still beat them.”

“Well, there’s your answer,” Munro said. “Now keep your mouth shut, and get some rest.”

DAY 5: MORUTI

June 17,1979

1. Zaire

FIVE HOURS OUT OF RAWAMAGENA, THE LANDSCAPE changed. Once past Goma, near the Zaire border, they found themselves flying over the easternmost fingers of the Congo rain forest. Elliot stared out the window, fascinated.

Here and there in the pale morning light, a few fragile wisps of fog clung like cotton to the canopy of trees. And occasionally they passed the dark snaking curve of a muddy river, or the straight deep red gash of a road. But for the most part they looked down upon an unbroken expanse of dense forest, extending away into the distance as far as the eye could see.

The view was boring, and simultaneously frightening—it was frightening to be confronted by what Stanley had called “the indifferent immensity of the natural world.” As one sat in the air-conditioned comfort of an airplane seat, it was impossible not to recognize that this vast, monotonous forest was a giant creation of nature, utterly dwarfing in scale the greatest cities or other creations of mankind. Each individual green puff of a tree had a trunk forty feet in diameter, soaring two hundred feet into the air; a space the size of a Gothic cathedral was concealed beneath its billowing foliage. And Elliot knew that the forest extended to the west for nearly two thousand miles, until it finally stopped at the Atlantic Ocean, on the west coast of Zaire.

Elliot had been anticipating Amy’s reaction to this first view of the jungle, her natural environment. She looked out the window with a fixed stare. She signed Here jungle with the same emotional neutrality that she named color cards, or objects spread out on her trailer floor in San Francisco. She was identifying the jungle, giving a name to what she saw, but he sensed no deeper recognition.

Elliot said to her, “Amy like jungle?”

Jungle here, she signed. Jungle is.

He persisted, probing for the emotional context that he was sure must be there. Amy like jungle?

Jungle here. Jungle is. Jungle place here Amy see jungle here.

He tried another approach. “Amy live jungle here?”

No. Expressionless.

“Where Amy live?”

Amy live Amy house. Referring to her trailer in San Francisco.

Elliot watched her loosen her seat belt, cup her chin on her hand as she stared lazily out the window. She signed, Amy want cigarette.

She had noticed Munro smoking.

“Later, Amy,” Elliot said.

At seven in the morning, they flew over the shimmering metal roofs of the tin and tantalum mining complex at Masisi. Munro, Kahega, and the other porters went to the back of the plane, where they worked on the equipment, chattering excitedly in Swahili.

Amy, seeing them go, signed, They worried.

“Worried about what, Amy?”

They worried men worry they worried problems. After a while, Elliot moved to the rear of the plane to find Munro’s men half buried under great heaps of straw, stuffing equipment into oblong torpedo-shaped muslin containers, then packing straw around the supplies. Elliot pointed to the muslin torpedoes. “What are these?”

“They’re called Crosslin containers,” Munro said. “Very reliable.”

“I’ve never seen equipment packed this way,” Elliot said, watching the men work. “They seem to be protecting our supplies very carefully.”

“That’s the idea,” Munro said. And he moved up the aircraft to the cockpit, to confer with the pilot.

Amy signed, Nosehair man lie Peter. “Nosehair man” was her term for Munro, but Elliot ignored her. He turned to Kahega. “How far to the airfield?”

Kahega glanced up. “Airfield?”

“At Mukenko.”

Kahega paused, thinking it over. “Two hours,” he said. And then he giggled. He said something in Swahili and all his brothers laughed, too.

“What’s funny?” Elliot said.

“Oh, Doctor,” Kahega said, slapping him on the back. “You are humorous by your nature.”

The airplane banked, making a slow wide circle in the air. Kahega and his brothers peered out the windows, and Elliot joined them. He saw only unbroken jungle—and then a column of green jeeps, moving down a muddy track far below. It looked like a military formation. He heard the word “Muguru” repeated several times.

“What’s the matter?” Elliot said. “Is this Muguru?”

Kahega shook his head vigorously. “No hell. This damn pilot, I warn Captain Munro, this damn pilot lost.”

“Lost?” Elliot repeated. Even the word was chilling.

Kahega laughed. “Captain Munro set him right, give him dickens.”

The airplane now flew east, away from the jungle toward a wooded highland area, rolling hills and stands of deciduous trees. Kahega’s brothers chattered excitedly, and laughed and slapped one another; they seemed to be having a fine time.

Then Ross came back, moving quickly down the aisle, her face tense. She unpacked cardboard boxes, withdrawing several basketball-sized spheres of tightly wrapped metal foil.

The foil reminded him of Christmas-tree tinsel. “What’s that for?” Elliot asked.

And then he heard the first explosion, and the Fokker shuddered in the air.

Running to the window, he saw a straight thin white vapor trail terminating in a black smoke cloud off to their right. The Fokker was banking, tilting toward the jungle. As he watched, a second trail streaked up toward them from the green forest below.

It was a missile, he realized. A guided missile.

“Ross!” Munro shouted.

“Ready!” Ross shouted back.

There was a bursting red explosion, and his view through the windows was obscured by dense smoke, The airplane shook with the blast, but continued the turn. Elliot couldn’t believe it: someone was shooting missiles at them.

“Radar!” Munro shouted. “Not optical! Radar!”

Ross gathered up the silver basketballs in her arms and moved back down the aisle. Kahega was opening the rear door, the wind whipping through the compartment.

“What the hell’s happening?” Elliot said.

“Don’t worry,” Ross said over her shoulder. “We’ll make up the time.” There was a loud whoosh, followed by a third explosion. With the airplane still banked steeply, Ross tore the wrappings from the basketballs and threw them out into the open sky.

Engines roaring, the Fokker swung eight miles to the south and climbed to twelve thousand feet, then circled the forest in a holding pattern. With each revolution, Elliot could see the foil strips hanging in the air like a glinting metallic cloud. Two more rockets exploded within the cloud. Even from a distance, the noise and the shock waves disturbed Amy; she was rocking back and forth in her seat, grunting softly.

“That’s chaff,” Ross explained, sitting in front of her portable computer console, pushing keys. “It confuses radar weapons systems. Those radar-guided SAMs read us as somewhere in the cloud.”

Elliot heard her words slowly, as if in a dream. It made no sense to him. “But who’s shooting at us?”

“Probably the FZA,” Munro said. “Forces Zairoises Armoises—the Zaire army.”

“The Zaire army? Why?”

“It’s a mistake,” Ross said, still punching buttons, not looking up.

“A mistake? They’re shooting surface-to-air missiles at us and it’s a mistake? Don’t you think you’d better call them and tell them it’s a mistake?”

“Can’t,” Ross said.

“Why not?”

“Because,” Munro said, “we didn’t want to file a flight plan in Rawamagena. That means we are technically in violation of Zaire airspace.”

“Jesus Christ,” Elliot said.

Ross said nothing. She continued to work at the computer console, trying to get the static to resolve on the screen, pressing one key after another.

“When I agreed to join this expedition,” Elliot said, beginning to shout, “I didn’t expect to get into a shooting war.”

“Neither did I,” Ross said. “It looks as if we both got more than we bargained for.”

Before Elliot could reply, Munro put an arm around his shoulder and took him aside. “It’s going to be all right,” he told Elliot. “They’re outdated sixties SAMs and most of them are blowing up because the solid propellant’s cracked with age. We’re in no danger. Just look after Amy, she needs your help now. Let me work with Ross.”

Ross was under intense pressure. With the airplane circling eight miles from the chaff cloud, she had to make a decision quickly. But she had just been dealt a devastating— and wholly unexpected—setback.

The Euro-Japanese consortium had been ahead of them from the very start, by approximately eighteen hours and twenty minutes. On the ground in Nairobi, Munro had worked out a plan with Ross which would erase that difference and put the ERTS expedition on-site forty hours ahead of the consortium team. This plan—which for obvious reasons she had not told Elliot—called for them to parachute onto the barren southern slopes of Mount Mukenko.

From Mukenko, Munro estimated it was thirty-six hours to the ruined city; Ross expected to jump at two o’clock that afternoon. Depending on cloud cover over Mukenko and the specific drop zone, they might reach the city as early as noon on June 19.

The plan was extremely hazardous. They would be jumping untrained personnel into a wilderness area, more than three days’ walk from the nearest large town. If anyone suffered a serious injury, the chances of survival were slight. There was also a question about the equipment: at altitudes of 8,000—10,000 feet on the volcanic slopes, air resistance was reduced, and the Crosslin packets might not provide enough protection.

Initially Ross had rejected Munro’s plan as too risky, but he convinced her it was feasible. He pointed out that the parafoils were equipped with automated altimeter-release devices; that the upper volcanic scree was as yielding as a sandy beach; that the Crosslin containers could be over-packed; and that he could carry Amy down himself.

Ross had double-checked outcome probabilities from the Houston computer, and the results were unequivocal. The probability of a successful jump was .7980, meaning there was one chance in five that someone would be badly hurt. However, given a successful jump, the probability of expedition success was .9934, making it virtually certain they would beat the consortium to the site.

No alternate plan scored so high. She had looked at the data and said, “I guess we jump.”

“I think we do,” Munro had said.

The jump solved many problems, for the geopolitical updates were increasingly unfavorable. The Kigani were now in full rebellion; the pygmies were unstable; the Zaire army had sent armored units into the eastern border area to put down the Kigani—and African field armies were notoriously trigger-happy. By jumping onto Mukenko, they expected to bypass all these hazards.

But that was before the Zaire army SAMs began exploding all around them. They were still eighty miles south of the intended drop zone, circling over Kigani territory, wasting time and fuel. It looked as if their daring plan, so carefully worked out and confirmed by computer, was suddenly irrelevant.

And to add to her difficulties, she could not confer with Houston; the computer refused to link up by satellite. She spent fifteen minutes working with the portable unit, boosting power and switching scrambler codes, until she finally realized that her transmission was being electronically jammed.

For the first time in her memory, Karen Ross wanted to cry.

“Easy now,” Munro said quietly, lifting her hand away from the keyboard. “One thing at a time, no point in getting upset.” Ross had been pressing the keys over and over again, unaware of what she was doing.

Munro was conscious of the deteriorating situation with both Elliot and Ross. He had seen it happen on expeditions before, particularly when scientists and technical people were involved. Scientists worked all day in laboratories where conditions could be rigorously regulated and monitored. Sooner or later, scientists came to believe that the outside world was just as controllable as their laboratories. Even though they knew better, the shock of discovering that the natural world followed its own rules and was indifferent to them represented a harsh psychic blow. Munro could read the signs.

“But this,” Ross said, “is obviously a non-military aircraft, how can they do it?”

Munro stared at her. In the Congolese civil war, civilian aircraft had been routinely shot down by all sides. “These things happen,” he said.

“And the jamming? Those bastards haven’t got the capability to jam us. We’re being jammed between our transmitter and our satellite transponder. To do that requires another satellite somewhere, and—” She broke off, frowning.

“You didn’t expect the consortium to Sit by idly,” Munro said. “The question is, can you fix it? Have you got countermeasures?”

“Sure, I’ve got countermeasures,” Ross said. “I can encode a burst bounce, I can transmit optically on an IR carrier, I can link a ground-base cable—but there’s nothing I can put together in the next few minutes, and we need information now. Our plan is shot.”

“One thing at a time,” Munro repeated quietly. He saw the tension in her features, and he knew she was not thinking clearly. He also knew he could not do her thinking for her; he had to get her calm again.

In Munro’s judgment, the ERTS expedition was already finished—they could not possibly beat the consortium to the Congo site. But he had no intention of quitting; he had led expeditions long enough to know that anything could happen, so he said, “We can still make up the lost time.”

“Make it up? How?”

Munro said the first thing that came to mind: “We’ll take the Ragora north. Very fast river, no problem.”

“The Ragora’s too dangerous.”

“We’ll have to see,” Munro said, although he knew that she was right. The Ragora was much too dangerous, particularly in June. Yet he kept his voice calm, soothing, reassuring. “Shall I tell the others?” he asked finally.

“Yes,” Ross said. In the distance, they heard another rocket explosion. “Let’s get out of here.”

Munro moved swiftly to the rear of the Fokker and said to Kahega, “Prepare the men.”

“Yes, boss,” Kahega said. A bottle of whiskey was passed around, and each of the men took a long swallow.

Elliot said, “What the hell is this?”

“The men are getting prepared,” Munro said.

“Prepared for what?” Elliot asked.

At that moment, Ross came back, looking grim. “From here on, we’ll continue on foot,” she said.

Elliot looked out the window. “Where’s the airfield?”

“There is no airfield,” Ross said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there is no airfield.”

“Is the plane going to put down in the fields?” Elliot asked.

“No,” Ross said. “The plane is not going to put down at all.”

“Then how do we get down?” Elliot asked, but even as he asked the question, his stomach sank, because he knew the answer.

“Amy will be fine,” Munro said cheerfully, cinching Elliot's straps tightly around his chest. “I gave her a shot of your Thoralen tranquilizer, and she’ll be quite calm. No problem at all, I’ll keep a good grip on her.”

“Keep a good grip on her?” Elliot asked.

“She’s too small to fit a harness,” Munro said. “I’ll have to carry her down.” Amy snored loudly, and drooled on Munro’s shoulder. He set Amy on the floor; she lay limply on her back, still snoring.

“Now, then,” Munro said. “Your parafoil opens automatically. You’ll find you have lines in both hands, left and right. Pull left to go left, right to go right, and—”

“What happens to her?” Elliot asked, pointing to Amy.

“I’ll take her. Pay attention now. If anything goes wrong, your reserve chute is here, on your chest.” He tapped a cloth bundle with a small black digital box, which read 4757. “That’s your rate-of-fall altimeter. Automatically pops your reserve chute if you hit thirty-six hundred feet and are still falling faster than two feet per second. Nothing to worry about; whole thing’s automatic.”

Elliot was chilled, drenched in sweat. “What about landing?”

“Nothing to it,” Munro grinned. “You’ll land automatically too. Stay loose and relax, take the shock in the legs. Equivalent of jumping off a ten-foot ledge. You’ve done it a thousand times.”

Behind him Elliot saw the open door, bright sunlight glacing into the plane. The wind whipped and howled. Kahega’s men jumped in quick succession, one after another. He glanced at Ross, who was ashen, her lower lip trembling as she gripped the doorway.

“Karen, you’re not going to go along with—”

She jumped, disappearing into the sunlight. Munro said, “You’re next.”

“I’ve never jumped before,” Elliot said.

“That’s the best way. You won’t be frightened.”

“But I am frightened.”

“I can help you with that,” Munro said, and he pushed Elliot out of the plane.

Munro watched him fall away, his grin instantly gone. Munro had adopted his hearty demeanor only for Elliot’s benefit. “If a man has to do something dangerous,” he said later, ‘it helps to be angry. It’s for his own protection, really. Better he should hate someone than fall apart. I wanted Elliot to hate me all the way down.”

Munro understood the risks, The minute they left the aircraft, they also left civilization, and all the unquestioned assumptions of civilization. They were jumping not only through the air, but through time, backward into a more primitive and dangerous way of life—the eternal realities of the Congo, which had existed for centuries before them. “Those were the facts of life,” Munro said, “but I didn’t see any reason to worry the others before they jumped. My job was to get those people into the Congo, not scare them to death. There was plenty of time for that.”

Elliot fell, scared to death.

His stomach jumped into his throat, and he tasted bile; the wind screamed around his ears and tugged at his hair; and the air was so cold—he was instantly chilled and shivering. Below him the Barawana Forest lay spread across rolling hills. He felt no appreciation for the beauty before him, and in fact he closed his eyes, for he was plummeting at hideous speed toward the ground. But with his eyes shut he was more aware of the screaming wind.

Too much time had passed. Obviously the parafoil (whatever the hell that was) was not going to open. His life now depended on the parachute attached to his chest. He clutched it, a small tight bundle near his churning stomach. Then he pulled his hands away: he didn’t want to interfere with its opening. He dimly remembered that people had died that way, when they interfered with the opening of their parachute.

The screaming wind continued; his body rushed sickeningly downward. Nothing was happening. He felt the fierce wind tugging at his feet, whipping his trousers, flapping his

shirt against his arms. Nothing was happening. It had been at least three minutes since he’d jumped from the plane. He dared not open his eyes, for fear of seeing the trees rushing up close as his body crashed downward toward them in his final seconds of conscious life.

He was going to throw up.

Bile dribbled from his mouth, but since he was falling head downward, the liquid ran up his chin to his neck and then inside his shirt. It was freezing cold. His shivering was becoming uncontrollable.

He snapped upright with a bone-twisting jolt.

For an instant he thought he had hit the ground, and then he realized that he was still descending through the air, but more slowly. He opened his eyes and stared at pale blue sky.

He looked down, and was shocked to see that he was still thousands of feet from the earth. Obviously he had only been falling a few seconds from the airplane above him— Looking up, he could not see the plane. Directly overhead was a giant rectangular shape, with brilliant red, white, and blue stripes: the parafoil. Finding it easier to look up than down, he studied the parafoil intently. The leading edge was curved and puffy; the rear edge thin, fluttering in the breeze. The parafoil looked very much like an airplane wing, with cords running down to his body.

He took a deep breath and looked down. He was still very high over the landscape. There was some comfort in the slowness with which he was descending. It was really rather peaceful.

And then he noticed he wasn’t moving down; he was moving sideways. He could see the other parafoils below, Kahega and his men and Ross; he tried to count them, and thought there were six, but he had difficulty concentrating. He appeared to be moving laterally away from them.

He tugged on the lines in his left hand, and he felt his body twist as the parafoil moved, taking him to the left.

Not bad, he thought.

He pulled harder on the left cords, ignoring the fact that this seemed to make him move faster. He tried to stay near the rectangles descending beneath him. He heard the scream of the wind in his ears. He looked up, hoping to see Munro, but all he could see was the stripes of his own parafoil.

He looked back down, and was astonished to find that the ground was a great deal closer. In fact, it seemed to be rushing up to him at brutal speed. He wondered where he had got the idea that he was drifting gently downward. There was nothing gentle about his descent at all. He saw the first of the parafoils crumple gently as Kahega touched ground, then the second, and the third.

It wouldn’t be long before he landed. He was approaching the level of the trees, but his lateral movement was very fast. He realized that his left hand was rigidly pulling on the cords. He released his grip, and his lateral movement ceased. He drifted forward.

Two more parafoils crumpled on impact. He looked back to see Kahega and his men, already down, gathering up the cloth. They were all right; that was encouraging.

He was sliding right into a dense clump of trees. He pulled his cords and twisted to the right, his whole body tilting. He was moving very fast now. The trees could not be avoided. He was going to smash into them. The branches seemed to reach up like fingers, grasping for him.

He closed his eyes, and felt the branches scratching at his face and body as he crashed down, knowing that any second he was going to hit, that he was going to hit the ground and roll— He never hit.

Everything became silent. He felt himself bobbing up and down. He opened his eyes and saw that he was swinging four feet above the ground. His parafoil had caught in the trees.

He fumbled with his harness buckles, and fell out onto the earth. As he picked himself up, Kahega and Ross came running over to ask if he was all right.

“I’m fine,” Elliot said, and indeed he felt extraordinarily fine, more alive than he could ever remember feeling. The next instant he fell over on rubber legs and promptly threw up.

Kahega laughed. “Welcome to the Congo,” he said.

Elliot wiped his chin and said, “Where is Amy?”

A moment later Munro landed, with a bleeding ear where Amy had bitten him in terror. But Amy was not the worse for the experience, and came running on her knuckles over to Elliot, making sure that he was all right, and then signing, Amy fly no like.

“Look out!”

The first of the torpedo-shaped Crosslin packets smashed down, exploding like a bomb when it hit the ground, spraying equipment and straw in all directions.

“There’s the second one!”

Elliot dived for safety. The second bomb hit just a few yards away; he was pelted with foil containers of food and rice. Overhead, he heard the drone of the circling Fokker airplane. He got to his feet in time to see the final two Crosslin containers crash down, and Kahega’s men running for safety, with Ross shouting, “Careful, those have the lasers!”

It was like being in the middle of a blitz, but as swiftly as it had begun it was over. The Fokker above them flew off, and the sky was silent; the men began repacking the equipment and burying the parafoils, while Munro barked instructions in Swahili.

Twenty minutes later, they were moving single-file through the forest, starting a two-hundred-mile trek that would lead them into the unexplored eastern reaches of the Congo, to a fabulous reward.

If they could reach it in time.

2. Kigani

ONCE PAST THE INITIAL SHOCK OF HIS JUMP, ELLIOT enjoyed the walk through the Barawana Forest. Monkeys chattered in the trees, and birds called in the cool air; the Kikuyu porters were strung out behind them, smoking cigarettes and joking with one another iii an exotic tongue. Elliot found all his emotions agreeable—the sense of freedom from a crass civilization; the sense of adventure, of unexpected events that might occur at any future moment; and finally the sense of romance, of a quest for the poignant past while omnipresent danger kept sensation at a peak of intense feeling. It was in this heightened mood that he listened to the forest animals around him, viewed the play of sunlight and shadow, felt the springy ground beneath his boots, and looked over at Karen Ross, whom he found beautiful and graceful in an utterly unexpected way.

Karen Ross did not look back at him.

As she walked, she twisted knobs on one of her black electronic boxes, trying to establish a signal. A second electronic box hung from a shoulder strap, and since she did not turn to look at him, he had time to notice that there was already a dark stain of sweat at her shoulder, and ‘another running down the back of her shirt. Her dark blonde hair was damp, clinging unattractively to the back of her head. And he noticed that her trousers were wrinkled, streaked with dirt from the fall. She still did not look back.

“Enjoy the forest,” Munro advised him. “This is the last time you’ll feel cool and dry for quite a while.”

Elliot agreed that the forest was pleasant.

“Yes, very pleasant.” Munro nodded, with an odd expression on his face.

The Barawana Forest was not virginal. From time to time, they passed cleared fields and other signs of human habitation, although they never saw farmers. When Elliot mentioned that fact, Munro just shook his head. As they moved deeper into the forest Munro turned self-absorbed, unwilling to talk. Yet he showed an interest in the fauna, frequently pausing to listen intently to bird cries before signaling the expedition to continue on.

During these pauses, Elliot would look back down the line of porters with loads balanced on their heads, and feel acutely his kinship with Livingstone and Stanley and the other explorers who had ventured through Africa a century before. And in this, his romantic associations were accurate. Central African life was little changed since Stanley explored the Congo in the 1870s, and neither was the basic nature of expeditions to that region. Serious exploration was still carried out on foot; porters were still necessary; expenses were still daunting—and so were the dangers.

By midday, Elliot’s boots had begun to hurt his feet, and he found that he was exceedingly tired. Apparently the porters were tired too, because they had fallen silent, no longer smoking cigarettes and shouting jokes to one another up and down the line. The expedition proceeded in silence until Elliot asked Munro if they were going to stop for lunch.

“No,” Munro said.

“Good,” Karen Ross said, glancing at her watch.

Shortly after one o’clock, they heard the thumping of helicopters. The reaction of Munro and the porters was immediate—they dived under a stand of large trees and waited, looking upwards. Moments later, two large green helicopters passed overhead; Elliot clearly read white stenciling: “FZA.”

Munro squinted at the departing craft. They were American-made Hueys; he had not been able to see the armament. “It’s the army,” he said. “They’re looking for Kigani.”

An hour later, they arrived at a clearing where manioc was being grown. A crude wooden farmhouse stood in the center, with pale smoke issuing from a chimney and laundry on a wash line flapping in the gentle breeze. But they saw no inhabitants.

The expedition had circled around previous farm clearings, but this time Munro raised his hand to call for a halt. The porters dropped their loads and sat in the grass, not speaking.

The atmosphere was tense, although Elliot could not understand why. Munro squatted with Kahega at the edge of the clearing, watching the farmhouse and the surrounding fields. After twenty minutes, when there was still no sign of movement, Ross, who was crouched near Munro, became impatient. “I don’t see why we are—”

Munro clapped his hand over her mouth. He pointed to the clearing, and mouthed one word: Kigani.

Ross’s eyes went wide. Munro took his hand away.

They all stared at the farmhouse. Still there was no sign of life. Ross made a circular movement with her arm, suggesting that they circle around the clearing and move on. Munro shook his head, and pointed to the ground, indicating that she should sit. Munro looked questioningly at Elliot, and pointed to Amy, who foraged in the tall grass off to one side. He seemed to be concerned that Amy would make noise. Elliot signed to Amy to be quiet, but it was not necessary. Amy had sensed the general tension, and glanced warily from time to time toward the farmhouse.

Nothing happened for several more minutes; they listened to the buzz of the cicadas in the hot midday sun, and they waited. They watched the laundry flutter in the breeze.

Then the thin wisp of blue smoke from the chimney stopped.

Munro and Kahega exchanged glances. Kahega slipped back to where the porters sat, opened one load, and brought out a machine gun. He covered the safety with his hand, muffling the click as he released it. It was incredibly quiet in the clearing. Kahega resumed his place next to Munro and handed him the gun. Munro checked the safety, then set the gun on the ground. They waited several minutes more. Elliot looked at Ross but she was not looking at him.

There was a soft creak as the farmhouse door opened. Munro picked up the machine gun.

No one came out. They all stared at the open door, waiting. And then finally the Kigani stepped into the sunlight.

Elliot counted twelve tall muscular men armed with bows and arrows, and carrying long pangas in their hands. Their legs and chests were streaked with white, and their faces were solid white, which gave their heads a menacing, skull like appearance. As the Kigani moved off through the tall manioc, only their white heads were visible, looking around tensely.

Even after they were gone, Munro remained watching the silent clearing for another ten minutes. Finally he stood and sighed. When he spoke, his voice seemed incredibly loud. “Those were Kigani,” Munro said.

“What were they doing?” Ross said.

“Eating,” Munro said. “They killed the family in that house, and then ate them. Most farmers have left, because the Kigani are on the rampage.”

He signaled Kahega to get the men moving again, and they set off, skirting around the clearing. Elliot kept looking at the farmhouse, wondering what he would see if he went inside. Munro’s statement had been so casual; They killed the family. . . and then ate them.

“I suppose,” Ross said, looking over her shoulder, “that we should consider ourselves lucky. We’re probably among the last people in the world to see these things.”

Munro shook his head. “I doubt it,” he said. “Old habits die hard.”

During the Congolese civil war in the 1960s, reports of widespread cannibalism and other atrocities shocked the Western world. But in fact cannibalism had always been openly practiced in central Africa.

In 1897, Sidney Hinde wrote that “nearly all the tribes in the Congo Basin either are, or have been, cannibals; and among some of them the practice is on the increase.” Hinde was impressed by the undisguised nature of Congolese cannibalism: “The captains of steamers have often assured me that whenever they try to buy goats from the natives, slaves are demanded in exchange; the natives often come aboard with tusks of ivory with the intention of buying a slave, complaining that meat is now scarce in their neighborhood.”

In the Congo, cannibalism was not associated with ritual or religion or war; it was a simple dietary preference. The Reverend Holman Bentley, who spent twenty years in the region, quoted a native as saying, “You white men consider pork to be the tastiest of meat, but pork is not to be compared with human flesh.” Bentley felt that the natives “could not understand the objections raised to the practice. ‘You eat fowls and goats, and we eat men; why not? What is the difference?’

This frank altitude astonished observers, and led to bizarre customs. In 1910, Herbert Ward wrote of markets where slaves were sold “piecemeal whilst still alive, incredible as it may appear, captives are led from place to place in order that individuals may have the opportunity of indicating, by external marks on the body, the portion they desire to acquire. The distinguishing marks are generally made by means of coloured clay or strips of grass tied in a peculiar fashion. The astounding stoicism of the victims, who thus witness the bargaining for their limbs piecemeal, is only equaled by the callousness with which they walk forward to meet their fate.”

Such reports cannot be dismissed as late-Victorian hysteria, for all observers found the cannibals likable and sympathetic. Ward wrote that “the cannibals are not schemers and they are not mean. In direct opposition to all natural conjectures, they are among the best types of men.” Bentley described them as “merry, manly fellows, very friendly in conversation and quite demonstrative in their affection.”

Under Belgian colonial administration, cannibalism became much rarer—by the 1950s, there were even a few graveyards to be found—but no one seriously thought it had been eradicated. In 1956, H. C. Engert wrote, “Cannibalism is far from being dead in Africa. . . . I myself once lived in a cannibal village for a time, and found some The natives. . . were pleasant enough people. It was just an old custom which dies hard.”

Munro considered the 1979 Kigani uprising a political insurrection. The tribesmen were rebelling against the demand by the Zaire government that the Kigani change from hunting to farming, as if that were a simple matter. The Kigani were a poor and backward people; their knowledge of hygiene was rudimentary, their diet lacked proteins and vitamins, and they were prey to malaria, hookworm, bilharzia, and African sleeping sickness. One child in four died at birth, and few Kigani adults lived past the age of twenty-five. The hardships of their life required explanation, supplied by Angawa, or sorcerers. The Kigani believed that most deaths were supernatural: either the victim was under a sorcerer’s spell, had broken some taboo, or was killed by vengeful spirits from the dead. Hunting also had a supernatural aspect: game was strongly influenced by the spirit world. In fact, the Kigani considered the supernatural world far more real than the day-to-day world, which they felt to be a “waking dream,” and they attempted to control the supernatural through magical spells and potions, provided by the Angawa. They also carried out ritual body alterations, such as painting the face and hands white, to render an individual more powerful in battle. The Kigani believed that magic also resided in the bodies of their adversaries, and so to overcome spells cast by other Angawa they ate the bodies of their enemies. The magical power invested in the enemy thus became their own, frustrating enemy sorcerers.

These beliefs were very old, and the Kigani had long since settled on a pattern of response to threat, which was to eat other human beings. In 1890, they went on the rampage in the north, following the first visits by foreigners bearing firearms, which had frightened off the game. During the civil war in 1961, starving, they attacked and ate other tribes.

“And why are they eating people now?” Elliot asked Munro.

“They want their right to hunt,” Munro said. “Despite the Kinshasa bureaucrats.”

In the early afternoon, the expedition mounted a hill from which they could overlook the valleys behind them to the south. In the distance they saw great billowing clouds of smoke and licking flames; there were the muffled explosions of air-to-ground rockets, and the helicopters wheeling like mechanical vultures over a kill.

“Those are Kigani villages,” Munro said, looking back, shaking his head. “They haven’t a prayer, especially since the men in those helicopters and the troops on the ground are all from the Abawe tribe, the traditional enemy of the Kigani.”

The twentieth-century world did not accommodate man-eating beliefs; indeed, the government in Kinshasa, two thousand miles away, had already decided to “expunge the embarrassment” of cannibals within its borders. In June, the Zaire government dispatched five thousand armed troops, six rocket-armed American UH-2 helicopters, and ten armored personnel carriers to put down the Kigani rebellion. The military leader in charge, General Ngo Muguru, had no illusions about his directive. Muguru knew that Kinshasa wanted him to eliminate the Kigani as a tribe. And he intended to do exactly that.

During the rest of the day, they heard distant explosions of mortar and rockets. It was impossible not to contrast the modernity of this equipment with the bows and arrows of the Kigani they had seen. Ross said it was sad, but Munro replied that it was inevitable.

“The purpose of life,” Munro said, “is to stay alive. Watch any animal in nature—all it tries to do is stay alive, it doesn’t care about beliefs or philosophy. Whenever any animal's behavior puts it out of touch with the realities of its existence, it becomes extinct. The Kigani haven’t seen that times have changed and their beliefs don’t work. And they’re going to be extinct.”

“Maybe there is a higher truth than merely staying alive,” Ross said.

“There isn’t,” Munro said.

They saw several other parties of Kigani, usually from a distance of many miles. At the end of the day, after they had crossed the swaying wooden bridge over the Moruti Gorge, Munro announced that they were now beyond the Kigani territory and, at least for the time being, safe.

3. Moruti Camp

IN A HIGH CLEARING ABOVE MORUTI, THE “PLACE of soft winds,” Munro shouted Swahili instructions and Kahega’s porters began to unpack their loads. Karen Ross looked at her watch. “Are we stopping?”

“Yes,” Munro said.

“But it’s only five o’clock. There’s still two hours of light left.”

“We stop here,” Munro said. Moruti was located at 1,500 feet; another two hours’ walking would put them down in the rain forest below. “It’s much cooler and more pleasant here.”

Ross said that she did not care about pleasantness.

“You will,” Munro said.

To make the best time, Munro intended to keep out of the rain forest wherever possible. Progress in the jungle was slow and uncomfortable; they would have more than enough experience with mud and leeches and fevers.

Kahega called to him in Swahili; Munro turned to Ross and said, “Kahega wants to know how to pitch the tents.”

Kahega was holding a crumpled silver ball of fabric in his outstretched hand; the other porters were just as confused, rummaging through their loads, looking for familiar tent poles or stakes, finding none.

The ERTS camp had been designed under contract by a NASA team in 1977, based on the recognition that wilderness expedition equipment was fundamentally unchanged since the eighteenth century. “Designs for modern exploration are long overdue,” ERTS said, and asked for state-of the-an improvements in lightness, comfort, and efficiency of expedition gear. NASA had redesigned everything, from clothing and boots to tents and cooking gear, food and menus, first-aid kits, and communications systems for ERTS wilderness parties.

The redesigned tents were typical of the’ NASA approach. NASA had determined that tent weight consisted chiefly of the structural supports. In addition, single-ply tents were poorly insulated. If tents could be properly insulated, clothing and sleeping-bag weight could be reduced, as could the daily caloric requirements of expedition members. Since air was an excellent insulator, the obvious solution was an unsupported, pneumatic tent: NASA designed one that weighed six ounces.

Using a little hissing foot pump, Ross inflated the first tent. It was made from double-layer silvered Mylar, and looked like a gleaming ribbed Quonset hut. The porters clapped their hands with delight; Munro shook his head, amused; Kahega produced a small silver unit, the size of a shoebox. “And this, Doctor? What is this?”

“We won’t need that tonight. That’s an air conditioner,” Ross said.

“Never go anywhere without one,” Munro said, still amused.

Ross glared at him. “Studies show,” she said, “that the single greatest factor limiting work efficiency is ambient temperature, with sleep deprivation as the second factor.”

“Really.”

Munro laughed and looked to Elliot, but Elliot was studiously examining the view of the rain forest in the evening sun. Amy came up and tugged at his sleeve.

Woman and nosehair man fight, she signed.

Amy had liked Munro from the beginning, and the feeling was mutual. Instead of patting her on the head and treating her like a child, as most people did, Munro instinctively treated her like a female. Then, too, he had been around enough gorillas to have a feeling for their behavior. Although he didn’t know ASL, when Amy raised her arms, he understood that she wanted to be tickled, and would oblige her for a few moments, while she rolled grunting with pleasure on the ground.

But Amy was always distressed by conflict, and she was frowning now. “They’re just talking,” Elliot assured her.

She signed, Amy want eat.

“In a minute.” Turning back, he saw Ross setting up the transmitting equipment; this would be a daily ritual during the rest of the expedition, and one which never failed to fascinate Amy. Altogether, the equipment to send a transmission ten thousand miles by satellite weighed six pounds, and the electronic countermeasures, or ECM devices, weighed an additional three pounds.

First, Ross popped open the collapsed umbrella of the silver dish antenna, five feet in diameter. (Amy particularly liked this; as each day progressed, she would ask Ross when she would “open metal flower.”) Then Ross attached the transmitter box, plugging in the krylon-cadmium fuel cells. Next she linked the anti-jamming modules, and finally she hooked up the miniaturized computer terminal with its tiny keyboard and three-inch video screen.

This miniature equipment was highly sophisticated. Ross’s computer had a 189K memory and all circuitry was redundant; housings were hermetically sealed and shockproof; even the keyboard was impedance-operated, so there were no moving parts to get gummed up, or admit water or dust.

And it was incredibly rugged. Ross remembered their “field tests.” In the ERTS parking lot, technicians would throw new equipment against the wall, kick it across the concrete, and leave it in a bucket of muddy water overnight. Anything found working the next day was certified as field-worthy.

Now, in the sunset at Moruti, she punched in code coordinates to lock the transmission to Houston, checked signal strength, and waited the six minutes until the transponders matched up. But the little screen continued to show only gray static, with intermittent pulses of color. That meant someone was jamming them with a “symphony.”

In ERTS slang, the simplest level of electronic jamming was called “tuba.” Like a kid next door practicing his tuba, this jamming was merely annoying; it occurred within limited frequencies, and was often random or accidental, but transmissions could generally pass through it. At the next level was “string quartet,” where multiple frequencies were jammed in an orderly fashion; next was “big band,” where the electronic music covered a wider frequency range; and finally “symphony,” where virtually the full transmission range was blocked.

Ross was now getting hit by a “symphony.” To break through demanded coordination with Houston—which she was unable to arrange—but ERTS had several prearranged routines. She tried them one after another and finally broke the jamming with a technique called interstitial coding. (Interstitial coding utilized the fact that even dense music had periods of silence, or interstices, lasting microseconds. It was possible to monitor the jamming signals, identify regularities in the interstices, and then transmit in bursts during the silences.)

Ross was gratified to see the little screen glow in a multicolored image—a map of their position in the Congo. She punched in the field position lock, and a light blinked on the screen. Words appeared in “shortline,” the compressed language devised for small-screen imagery. F I L D TME-POSITN CHEK; PLS CONFRM LOCL TME 18:04 H 6/17/79. She confirmed that it was indeed just after 6 P.M. at their location. Immediately, overlaid lines produced a scrambled pattern as their Field Time—Position was measured against the computer simulation run in Houston before their departure.

Ross was prepared for bad news. According to her mental calculations, they had fallen some seventy-odd hours behind their projected timeline, and some twenty-odd hours behind the consortium.

Their original plan had called for them to jump onto the slopes of Mukenko at 2 P.M. on June 17, arriving at Zinj approximately thirty-six hours later, around midday of June 19. This would have put them onsite nearly two days before the consortium.

However, the SAM attack forced them to jump eighty miles south of their intended drop zone. The jungle terrain before them was varied, and they could expect to pick up time rafting on rivers, but it would still take a minimum of three days to go eighty miles.

That meant that they could no longer expect to beat the consortium to the site. Instead of arriving forty-eight hours ahead, they would be lucky if they arrived only twenty-four hours too late.

To her surprise, the screen blinked: FILD TME—POSITN CHEK : —09 : 04 H WEL DUN. They were only nine hours off their simulation timeline.

“What does that mean?” Munro asked, looking at the screen.

There was only one possible conclusion. “Something has slowed the consortium,” Ross said.

On the screen they read EURO/NIP0N C0NSRTIM LEGL TRUBL GOMA AIRPRT ZAIR THEIR AIRCRFT FOUND RADIOACTIVE TUF LUK FOR THEM.

“Travis has been working back in Houston,” Ross said. She could imagine what it must have cost ERTS to put in the fix at the rural airport in Goma. “But it means we can still do it, if we can make up the nine hours.”

“We can do it,” Munro said.

In the light of the setting equatorial sun, Moruti camp gleamed like a cluster of dazzling jewels—a silver dish antenna, and five silver-domed tents, all reflecting the fiery sun. Peter Elliot sat on the hilltop with Amy and stared at the rain forest spread out below them. As night fell, the first hazy strands of mist appeared; and as the darkness deepened and water vapor condensed in the cooling air, the forest became shrouded in dense, darkening fog.

DAY 6: LIKO

June 18, 1979

1. Rain Forest

THE NEXT MORNING THEY ENTERED THE HUMID perpetual gloom of the Congo rain forest.

Munro noted the return of old feelings of oppression and claustrophobia, tinged with a strange, overpowering lassitude. As a Congo mercenary in the 1960s, he had avoided the jungle wherever possible. Most military engagements had occurred in open spaces—in the Belgian colonial towns, along riverbanks, beside the red dirt roads. Nobody wanted to fight in the jungle; the mercenaries hated it, and the superstitious Sambas feared it. When the mercenaries advanced, the rebels often fled into the bush, but they never went very far, and Munro’s troops never pursued them. They just waited for them to come out again.

Even in. the 1960s the jungle remained terra incognita, -an unknown land with the power to hold the technology of mechanized warfare beyond its periphery. And with good reason, Munro thought. Men just did not belong there. He was not pleased to be back.

Elliot, never having been in a rain forest, was fascinated. The jungle was different -from the way he had imagined it to be. He was totally unprepared for the scale—the gigantic trees soaring over his head, the trunks as broad as a house, the thick snaking moss-covered roots. To move in the vast space beneath these trees was like being in a very dark cathedral: the sun was completely blocked, and he could not get an exposure reading on his camera.

He had also expected the jungle to be much denser than it was. Their party moved through it freely; in a surprising way it seemed barren and silent—there were occasional birdcalls and cries from monkeys, but otherwise a profound stillness settled over them. And it was oddly monotonous: although he saw every shade of green in the foliage and the clinging creeper vines, there were few flowers or blooms. Even the occasional orchids seemed pale and muted.

He had expected rotting decay at every turn, but that was not true either. The ground underfoot was often firm, and the air had a neutral smell. But it was incredibly hot, and it seemed as though everything was wet—the leaves, the ground, the trunks of the trees, the oppressively still air itself, trapped under the overhanging trees.

Elliot would have agreed with Stanley’s description from a century before: “Overhead the wide-spreading branches absolutely shut out the daylight. . We marched in a feeble twilight. . . The dew dropped and pattered on us incessantly. . . Our clothes were heavily saturated with it.

Perspiration exuded from every pore, for the atmosphere was stifling. . . . What a forbidding aspect had the Dark Unknown which confronted us!”

Because Elliot had looked forward to his first experience of the equatorial African rain forest, he was surprised at how quickly he felt oppressed—and how soon he entertained thoughts of leaving again. Yet the tropical rain forests had spawned most new life forms, including man. The jungle was not one uniform environment but many different microenvironments, arranged vertically like a layer cake. Each microenvironment supported a bewildering profusion of plant and animal life, but there were typically few members of each species. The tropical jungle supported four times as many species of animal life as a comparable temperate forest. As he walked through the forest, Elliot found himself thinking of it as an enormous hot, dark womb, a place where new species were nourished in unchanging conditions until they were ready to migrate out to the harsher and more variable temperate zones. That was the way it had been for millions of years.

Amy’s behavior immediately changed as she entered the vast humid darkness of her original home. In retrospect, Elliot believed he could have predicted her reaction, had he Thought it through clearly.

Amy no longer kept up with the group.

She insisted on foraging along the trail, pausing to sit and chew tender shoots and grasses. She could not be budged or hurried, and ignored Elliot’s requests that she stay with them. She ate lazily, a pleasant, rather vacant expression on her face. In shafts of sunlight, she would lie on her back, and belch, and sigh contentedly.

“What the hell is this all about?” Ross asked, annoyed. They were not making good time.

“She’s become a gorilla again,” Elliot said. “Gorillas are vegetarians, and they spend nearly all day eating; they’re large animals, and they need a lot of food.” Amy had immediately reverted to these traits.

“Well, can’t you make her keep up with us?”

“I’m trying. She won’t pay attention to me.” And he knew why—Amy was finally back in a world where Peter Elliot was irrelevant, where she herself could find food and security and shelter, and everything else that she wanted.

“School’s out,” Munro said, summarizing the situation. But he had a solution. “Leave her,” he said crisply, and he led the party onward. He took Elliot firmly by the elbow. “Don’t look back,” he said. “Just walk on. Ignore her.”

They continued for several minutes in silence. Elliot said, “She may not follow us.” “Come, come, Professor,” Munro said. “I thought you knew about gorillas.”

“I do,” Elliot said.

“Then you know there are none in this part of the rain forest.”

Elliot nodded; he had seen no nests or spoor. “But she has everything she needs here.”

“Not everything,” Munro said. “Not without other gorillas around.”

Like all higher primates, gorillas were social animals. They lived in a group, and they were not comfortable—or safe—in isolation. In fact, most primatologists assumed that there was a need for social contact as strongly perceived as hunger, thirst, or fatigue.